As famous as John Carpenter is for works like The Thing and the Halloween franchise, Assault On Precinct 13 is another one of my all-time favs from him and ranks high with the scariest things he’s conceived. But as mesmerizing and unsettling as that film is, I wouldn’t exactly consider it a barrelful of laughs (especially not once you get to the infamous Ice Cream Truck sequence). Here’s where Joe Carnahan steps in with Copshop, a giddy thriller that seeks to capture that tense feeling of dread and approaching doom that Precinct 13 also featured, except with way more humor, snappy banter, and even a bit of slapstick at points. You’d think those two creative philosophies wouldn’t blend well together, but this 70s style pulp shootout is full of things that may catch you off guard in a good way.
Like Carpenter’s film, it also involves an assault on a police station, except instead of a vengeful gang just targeting the officers inside specifically, the real target is Teddy Muretto, played by Frank Grillo as a sleazebag conman for the mob, running from the contract killers pursuing the bounty on his head after an attorney general winds up dead.
His plan is to get in a fight with Valerie Young (Alexis Louder), a rookie cop who’s proud of her new firearm and isn’t afraid to point it in the face of anyone who doesn’t give her the information she needs. Louder steals the movie at various points (especially in the insane chaotic ending), showing a mix of Judy Hopps-style determination and John McClane’s ability to survive ridiculous amounts of physical trauma.
Officer Young’s mounting problems not only include Teddy but also Gerald Butler as bounty hunter Bob Viddick, who is incredibly imposing and definitely someone you wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alley but always in a wry manner. While Bob informs Teddy just how badly he’s violated his deal with the feds and the hammer about to fall on him, his annoyance with an obnoxious cellmate is a surprising grimly funny sequence that you wouldn’t expect from this genre most of the time.
That hammer is the maniacal Anthony Lamb, played by Toby Huss, another killer sent by the gangsters after Teddy. Huss gives his hitman the same kind of crazy energy he gives to Hank’s dad Cotton on King of the Hill, except in an even more twisted fashion. Our three leads have enough trouble trusting each other through this situation enough as it is, they don’t also need Anthony singing Curtis Mayfield parodies and cracking jokes about Tom Cruise films, all while he’s blasting machine gun fire at them.
For the most part, it’s a pretty straightforward revenge story, with a couple of moles thrown into Gun Creek’s PD to spice things up as Ryan O’Nan’s Officer Huber hustles some drugs for Lamb. And at no point in this film was I thinking “okay, they’re gonna have to cool it with this ha-ha”, because all of that Ha-Ha was subtlely adding to the character development throughout the slow burn. This leads me to a larger point about utilizing humor in action movies, because we’ve all heard the complaints about how many comic book films sometimes go overboard with having to force in their jokes.
This isn’t much of an issue in Copshop since even though many of the plot details are kinda crazy, outside of the villain no one’s making light about the actual danger they’re in, so the payoffs still feel earned. More than anything, the comedy in Carnahan’s film helps to undercut the otherwise dark atmosphere, and it still fits in line with the cast’s personalities.
It’s one of those films where everyone is clearly enjoying themselves through it, which helps to elevate a mostly cut-and-dry plotline that isn’t trying to be profound or highbrow. But when the story needs to pick back up, it does so fairly quickly, so as everything is being laid out you don’t feel like your time is being wasted.
A couple of the visual gags kind of tiptoe towards the wackier side, as Teddy twitches comically on the ground after being tased and the way in which he survives a car bomb, a pinch of bathroom humor, and also how Butler literally does a Ric Flair flop in one scene- but I wouldn’t say it crosses over to the Looney Tunes level. The grit is still there, and you definitely start to get that Carpenter-esque vibe as the scale of the threat is exposed, and characters are forced to make some tough decisions.
There’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek aspect to much of the violence and gore (and there’s only so much, with more time spent up to build up everyone’s story). That combined with Toby Huss just being out of his mind here helps to give Copshop a unique and engaging atmosphere.
It’s rare when you can recommend a dark neo-noir on the basis that it’s just plain fun, but this movie certainly qualifies. The dialogue packs plenty of subtle with, but don’t expect any super-serious navel-gazing or extremely heavy themes coming into this movie, rather a retro-toned action banger with two leads played by Louder and Butler that I’d like to see more adventures from. If you’ve had the chance to see it, let us know what you thought as always on FAN’s social media channels!