Cop Car

Two wee boys are wandering through the wilds of Colorado's Quinlan County. They're running away, equipped with essential supplies like beef jerky and a wallet hidden from pickpockets. Hidden in a stretch of trees they find the eponymous automobile, the distinctive outline of a Ford Crown Victoria. The car is the brown of the Sheriff's department, the same brown as half the beads on the back-preserving seat cover, of the glass of the beer bottle left on its bonnet. The same brown as the dried branches and bark of trees in this middle of nowhere, the same earthy richness as tarpaulin, as uniform trousers, as dried blood. Lighter browns too, as yet unseen. Cigarette filters. Brown paper around a liquor bottle. A bag of quicklime. Kevin Bacon's moustache.

Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford). It was a début role for Jackson, he's not done much since. Wellford would go on to also have a minor role in crime flavoured James Spader nonsense The Blacklist, and Independence Day: Resurgence. The childishness of the dialogue is apposite. Not just the gleeful repetition of rude words (of various degrees), a "Yeah me too" after contextual Mario Kart, but the fear that a pebble that accidentally strikes the eponymous automobile has their fingerprints on it. That's not the only important evidence of crime, but we'll get to that.

No Country For Old Men starts in similar circumstances, but if this were to be compared to any of the Coens' oeuvre it'd be Fargo and their other bleaker comedies. A pair of aviator sunglasses hastily donned as a 'disguise' is a moment that made me laugh out loud as gleefully as any of the nonsenses of the Soggy Bottom Boys.

Jon Watts and Christopher Ford had worked together before this, on a horror short, Clown, and then its feature version. They would go on to direct the post-Sony Spider-Man MCU pictures Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home. They'd also done music videos and a bunch of comedy TV. Jordan Peele recently joked that the difference between comedy and horror was the music. They certainly both benefit from careful setup, rely on suspension of disbelief on their way to the payoff, draw strength from surprise.

Cop Car is full of detail. It's not just the smorgasbord of browns, the datelessness of a fictional rural county that shares its name with a town near Dallas, a Jedi Knight, and Kathleen who was in the structurally and thematically similar Breakdown at a similar point in Jonathan Mostow's career. That people smoke, and in restaurants, ones with wood panelling and premium effect leather-style edging on the laminated menu sleeve. It's in little bits of sound, abject terror on the face of the the man in the bathrobe (Shea Whigham), the disregard for firearms safety and that the Swiss-Army knife is missing the tweezers and toothpick.

The film is as efficient and multifunctional. A small cast covers quite a lot of ground. The action might take place over just a few hours, but in a tight hour and a half it's got a huge amount of tension. Bacon makes a credible antagonist but the film rests on the small shoulders of the two boys. While there are moments that reminded me of Lost Highway, several of Terminator 2, and a few of Stand By Me it's a thing of itself, and a treat. As an early work by a creative team who would go on to much larger budgets and franchise success it reminded me of the Wachowski sisters' Bound, not least because its confidence in tone and technique explain why they were given the keys to much larger apparatus. There's a joke I often reference that "neo-noir" means films about ambulances, and while its score is more country than blues, Cop Car definitely lights up the screen.