I’m just the balloon man.

Copshop

(2021)

(SPOILERS) A consistent problem with Joe Carnahan’s oeuvre is that, no matter how confidently his movies begin, or how strong his premise, or how adept his direction or compelling the performances he extracts, he ends up blowing it. He blows it with Copshop, a ’70s-inspired variant on Assault on Precinct 13 that is pretty damn good during the first hour, before devolving into his standard mode of sado-nihilistic mayhem.

And perhaps that’s his core flaw, keeping him from more mainstream favour. Others versed in the snappy, colloquial, kinetic crime genre – Tarantino, Ritchie, even Vaughn – tend to bring with them a certain charm or winning personality. All Carnahan can offer is empty brutality, further soured by an emphasis on sick/twisted graphic violence. He attempted a gritty meditation on mortality with The Grey, but all he came away with was hollow abnegation. Copshop gives us two bad men – Carnahan’s favourite kind – either side of good, super-capable rookie cop Valerie (Alexis Louder), and for a while, at least, her presence ameliorates the obnoxious brew.

Louder’s a likeable presence, and the environment of her police station, staffed by incompetent and/or lazy fellow officers, is a familiar one, set up for her to prove herself. Unfortunately, Carnahan does his best to get in his own way, defusing the potential of the situation. Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo, not as versatile a performer as his facial hair might suggest) is the mob fixer who gets himself arrested in order to avoid hitman Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler). Teddy incurred his bosses’ wrath when he agreed to cooperate with the FBI (following the murder of the Nevada Attorney General), and his attempt to find safe harbour in the station is hampered by Viddick following his example and being placed in an opposite cell.

It’s a scenario to get the creative juices flowing, based on a story by Mark Williams (Ozark) and Kurt McLeod. Initially, at least, Carnahan rises to the challenge, with Valerie intervening just when it seems as if Viddick has Murretto at his mercy. Further plates are set spinning by a bent cop Huber (Ryan O’Nan) and the arrival of competing hitman Anthony Lamb (Toby Huss on extraordinarily lunatic form): “Now you see the difference? That is a psychopath” advises Viddick of the gulf between his “professional” activity and Lamb revelling in carnage (the scene where the doofus desk officer marvels at the balloon man’s similarity to Lamb’s mugshot is most amusing). There are also the crooked officers in the Attorney General case, whom Valerie inadvertently alerts to the station situation.

Up until somewhere around the hour mark, then, Copshop is a largely satisfying concoction, brewing and bubbling with possibilities, especially after the injured Valerie has to lock herself in the cells with her feuding prisoners while Lamb and Huber attempt to break in. But then. Instead of formulating an ingenious way out (perhaps there isn’t one), Carnahan resorts to upping the ante on the ultraviolence. Murretto turns out to be the lost cause Viddick insists he is, and somehow – Butler doing his standard gruff, dishevelled schtick – Viddick emerges as the honourable antihero. I’m not sure quite why Carnahan thinks he achieves or merits this, mainly because he doesn’t. He simply decides at some point that Murretto is wrong and Viddick is right (because Viddick has a code?), and therefore the latter deserves Valerie’s respect.

Most unearned is the salutary final scene, as Viddick escapes the police station and Valerie commandeers an ambulance to give chase, while they both sing Freddie’s Dead by Curtis Mayfield. We aren’t even close to the point where they are old frenemies we want to see embarking on further cat-and-mouse adventures. Further to which, Carnahan transfers the iconography of ’70s action movies – Lalo Schifrin, titles, Clifton Shorter’s soundtrack – but none of the aesthetic affection. Which means it ends up as wannabe Tarantino and exposes how far he comes up short.

More disappointing are the missed opportunities. In Chad L Coleman (Duane Mitchell, who played Cutty in The Wire and Fred Johnson in The Expanse), Carnahan has come up with a classic, loveably grouchy station commander in the Joel Silver mould; it would have been an absolute joy to have him turn out to be the unlikely protagonist of the piece. Instead, the commander has his jaw dislocated, shutting him up for a good twenty minutes before Huber shoots him in the head. It’s as if Carnahan can’t help himself and just has to make movies that are difficult to love and as impossible to redeem as his protagonists.

Which, as alluded, likely goes to explain his lack of mainstream success. Inaccurate swipes at those he’s fallen out with probably don’t help either (“You look like old Tom Cruise in the samurai picture that nobody watched”; unaccountably, since it’s pretty crummy, loads of people did watch it. Will Smith and Bruce Willis jibes will be coming next, I expect). Add Copshop to the pile of Carnahan also-rans. Still, he seems to have found a B-niche right now, after the best part of a decade in limbo. It’s just a shame this year’s rash of activity hasn’t seen him revealing hitherto concealed reserves of humanity.

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Prey (2022) (SPOILERS) If nothing else, I have to respect Dan Trachtenberg’s cynical pragmatism. How do I not only get a project off the ground, but fast-tracked as well? I know, a woke Predator movie! Woke Disney won’t be able to resist! And so, it comes to pass. Luckily for Prey , it gets to bypass cinemas and so the same sorry fate of Lightyear . Less fortunately, it’s a patience-testing snook cocking at historicity (or at least, assumed historicity), in which a young, pint-sized Comanche girl who wishes to hunt and fish – and doubtless shoot to boot – with the big boys gets to take on a Predator and make mincemeat of him. Well, of course , she does. She’s a girl, innit?

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Pulp Fiction (1994) (SPOILERS) From a UK perspective, Pulp Fiction ’s success seemed like a fait accompli; Reservoir Dogs had gone beyond the mere cult item it was Stateside and impacted mainstream culture itself (hard to believe now that it was once banned on home video); it was a case of Tarantino filling a gap in the market no one knew was there until he drew attention to it (and which quickly became over-saturated with pale imitators subsequently). Where his debut was a grower, Pulp Fiction hit the ground running, an instant critical and commercial success (it won the Palme d’Or four months before its release), only made cooler by being robbed of the Best Picture Oscar by Forrest Gump . And unlike some famously-cited should-have-beens, Tarantino’s masterpiece really did deserve it.

I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

Last Action Hero (1993) (SPOILERS) Make no mistake, Last Action Hero is a mess. But even as a mess, it might be more interesting than any other movie Arnie made during that decade, perhaps even in his entire career. Hellzapoppin’ (after the 1941 picture, itself based on a Broadway revue) has virtually become an adjective to describe films that comment upon their own artifice, break the fourth wall, and generally disrespect the convention of suspending disbelief in the fictions we see parading across the screen. It was fairly audacious, some would say foolish, of Arnie to attempt something of that nature at this point in his career, which was at its peak, rather than playing it safe. That he stumbled profoundly, emphatically so since he went up against the behemoth that is Jurassic Park (slotted in after the fact to open first), should not blind one to the considerable merits of his ultimate, and final, really, attempt to experiment with the limits of his screen persona.

Death to Bill and Ted!

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) (SPOILERS) The game of how few sequels are actually better than the original is so well worn, it was old when Scream 2 made a major meta thing out of it (and it wasn’t). Bill & Ted Go to Hell , as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was originally called, is one such, not that Excellent Adventure is anything to be sneezed at, but this one’s more confident, even more playful, more assured and more smartly stupid. And in Peter Hewitt it has a director with a much more overt and fittingly cartoonish style than the amiably pedestrian Stephen Herrick. Evil Bill : First, we totally kill Bill and Ted. Evil Ted : Then we take over their lives. My recollection of the picture’s general consensus was that it surpassed the sleeper hit original, but Rotten Tomatoes’ review aggregator suggests a less universal response. And, while it didn’t rock any oceans at the box office, Bogus Journey and Point Break did quite nicely for Keanu Reev

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) (SPOILERS) Avengers: Age of Ultron ’s problem isn’t one of lack. It benefits from a solid central plot. It features a host of standout scenes and set pieces. It hands (most of) its characters strong defining moments. It doesn’t even suffer now the “wow” factor of seeing the team together for the first time has subsided. Its problem is that it’s too encumbered. Maybe its asking to much of a director to effectively martial the many different elements required by an ensemble superhero movie such as this, yet Joss Whedon’s predecessor feels positively lean in comparison. Part of this is simply down to the demands of the vaster Marvel franchise machine. Seeds are laid for Captain America: Civil War , Infinity Wars I & II , Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok . It feels like several spinning plates too many. Such activity occasionally became over-intrusive on previous occasions ( Iron Man II ), but there are points in Age of Ultron whe

Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.

Paterson (2016) (SPOILERS) Spoiling a movie where nothing much happens is difficult, but I tend to put the tag on in a cautionary sense much of the time. Paterson is Jim Jarmusch at his most inert and ambient but also his most rewardingly meditative. Paterson (Adam Driver), a bus driver and modest poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, is a stoic in a fundamental sense, and if he has a character arc of any description, which he doesn’t really, it’s the realisation that is what he is. Jarmusch’s picture is absent major conflict or drama; the most significant episodes feature Paterson’s bus breaking down, the English bull terrier Marvin – whom Paterson doesn’t care for but girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) dotes on – destroying his book of poetry, and an altercation at the local bar involving a gun that turns out to be a water pistol. And Paterson takes it all in his stride, genial to the last, even the ruination of his most earnest, devoted work (the only disappoint

If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder.

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This entire edifice you see around you, built on jute.

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I think it’s pretty clear whose side the Lord’s on, Barrington.

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Your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

Enemy Mine (1985) (SPOILERS) The essential dynamic of Enemy Mine – sworn enemies overcome their differences to become firm friends – was a well-ploughed one when it was made, such that it led to TV Tropes assuming, since edited, that it took its title from an existing phrase (Barry Longyear, author of the 1979 novella, made it up, inspired by the 1961 David Niven film The Best of Enemies ). The Film Yearbook Volume 5 opined that that Wolfgang Petersen’s picture “ lacks the gritty sauciness of Hell in the Pacific”; John Boorman’s WWII film stranded Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on a desert island and had them first duking it out before becoming reluctant bedfellows. Perhaps germanely, both movies were box office flops.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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