Copshop

I'm the sorta cinephile who likes to do my research before adding any TV show to my watchlist. Maybe it's because I never want to get into watching a TV show that would end up getting me pissed with poor production quality. Haha. If it's a Movie, on the other hand, I wouldn't mind walking into it without having a clue of what to expect. The worst that could happen is to get through 2 hours of playtime.

That's pretty much what happened when I got this movie recommendation. I walked in blind without any clue of what to expect from the storyline or the cast in the show. To be fair, even if I checked, I probably wouldn't have been able to predict the quality of their casting because I'm not the biggest fan of American movies.

Here's what the Movie is all about;

Movie: Copshop.

Genre: Action, Thriller, Crime.

Release Date: 2021

Runtime: 1h 47m

This Movie is centered on a con artist who's also a fixer who got into a couple of wrong deals and became a target of assassins. He got on the run with an unregistered Police car with multiple bullet holes all over it. The car broke down close to Nevada Casino where folks were exchanging blows with each other.

The fixer who's on the run blended into the fight scene, sucker punched a rookie Policewoman, and got dragged to jail. What the Police didn't know was that the move made by the fixer was his own way of improvising so he could walk into jail and be under the protection of the Police. That was his grand plan to stay safe from the hunt of the assassins who were hunting him down.

What he didn't expect is exactly what happened next. One of the hitmen chasing him, Viddick, also got himself thrown into the holding cell of that same Police station by acting drunk. Viddick is hell-bent on performing his art and getting the job done, but he wasn't locked up in the same cell as the fixer. They both had a verbal altercation before Viddick made an attempt to get his kill.

The attempt failed, thanks to the reaction from the rookie Policewoman. She noticed something was fishy about the two arrests and started to dig deeper to know what was going on. She only managed to dig deep enough before a new killer walked into the Police Station and turned it into fireworks. This new killer is a pure psychopath who enjoys the art of killing. What happens next? The plot thickens with this new introduction.

Check out the above trailer to get a snippet of what the show is all about. The show itself gives the vibe of a good old-school action thriller with a good blend of comedy. I particularly think the lines given to some of the characters in their dialogue are quite poetic. Their lines had me in stitches. Haha.

One of the things that's distasteful about this Movie is that all the Policemen were dumb in their reaction to the attacks that happened at the Police station. Their situational awareness and their assessment of danger around them is very annoying. They basically got smoked out without putting up a fight. The rookie was different though. She deserves her flowers in comparison to her colleagues.

If I'm to make an excuse for the Police, all I can say is that it's a very small and "boring" town and they've always had to deal with petty criminals and drunks. They could have done better in the defense of the station, but thinking of this makes things a bit understandable. For the record, the highest-ranked officer in their Police station was a sergeant. That's too low to be the highest ranked in an entire Police station.

Thanks For Not Missing Any Full-stop or Comma. _{Thumbnail Image is a screenshot taken from IMBD
Trailer video is shared from YouTube.}

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You ever watched a cop movie and go "yeah, this cop is out to save the day, get the dame, stop a crisis from happening, and kill the badguy". Yeah, you would summarize Speed. Well, this movie instead is kind of like Speed when it comes to the high-octane, but plot-wise, has a lot of angles to look.

There's a lot of build up, character expositions, all this before the ball gets really rolling. This movie is a large assassination plot film. Where one guy who looks for safety, gets an entire police station dragged in before everything starts turning up to be disaster, as people looking for him will do what it takes to get to to their target.

The film was set to be in production since September 2020, as the lead cast were selected as Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo. Despite having a veteran like Mark Williams involved, the screenplay was written by Kurt McLeod, a newcomer who worked as a financial advisor in Edmonton. A recent draft of it was given by director Joe Carnahan. All the parties from Mark Williams and Joe Carnahan along wiht their production studio got the project going. Within a month, all the casts have been chosen.

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Principal photography was done in Atlanta, Georgia, before shooting began in Albuquerque, Mexico. Somewhere between shooting, someone caught the flu and it was postponed. Filming wrapped right after 2 months. And, according to Grillo, Carnahan's cut for the film was rejected for a different cut.

That would make things interesting considering most of the film has his creative supervision all over. There's also another news about Grillo being upset about his 'colorful' performance being cut out. It would seem the producers fiddled a lot with this movie.

Copshop is a hyper-stylized yet subdued action thriller that has a story quite unorthodox. You have trash talking, close shots of people, stylized action sequences with crazy editing and cinematography, and a high stakes premise. But the thing that really makes it different is the fact that nobody is seen as the protagonist until the end of the film.

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Story takes place in a police station in the middle of nowhere, where two people who assaulted police officer, one after the other got arrested and thrown in jail. It takes half a movie to get the entire premise before the action gets really going.

Am not a fan of Joe Carnahan and his work. Not always. I do admire what he tries to do, most of his stuff pays nodes to stuff like Dolemite, exploition movies, gritty Guy Ritchie stuff, and occassionally having obscene swearing. He's done movies like Smoking Aces and A-Team remake, which were ah, let's say 50/50 for me. But the one film I really did like of his, was The Grey.

Most of the characters aren't the type you grow into, because that's not entirely the point of the movie. A mistake people watching this will go "well, I never cared about any of these guys, they never tried to make me become attached to them". That will defeat the purpose of the story. There's a grand scale mysticism embued within everybody. All of the interesting characters intersect and duel up in this Alamo/Attack on Precinct 13 type situation. You can't exactly root for anyone because nobody is being treated as a protagonist of sorts. Up until the end that is.

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But when things do go down, your eyes are just locked on the screen. Pure adrenaline rush, the whole time the only thing that'll keep you interested in watching is who'll survive and how? It's the thrill of the carnage in this spaghetti kind of situation that has you invested within the 2nd half of the film.

Though I can see some people being turned off my the 1st half, first few minutes of it do not exactly entice you entirely on the film till you're convinced somewhere there is something interesting going on, and it really does. Despite the flamboyant nature of the swearing, and some lame "gotcha" moments, this movie found its place as one of those cop vs robbers/hitman/crooked cops type situation. The story mostly holds up.

If you've watched past the 25 minute mark and you still aren't invested, well then I got nothing to convince you otherwise. Because that's when the film starts drawing out the curtains.

For some reason, Gerard Butler's been making good movies as of late. Like, really good movies. Sometimes changing up the typecast thing as well. Hopefully I see him in other great movies as well. Maybe I jinxed it by saying that. But yeah, movie's a solid good time, especially for people who are fans of John Carpenter's early works before he got into horror movies.

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