To create a successful action/suspense film, one has to make something that viewers wind up submerging themselves into.  In the best of all circumstances the viewer is no longer watching actors acting, they’re witnessing real life play out before them.  We root for the good guys/gals and hiss at the bad guys/gals and, as the action/suspense torque up, we fearfully wonder how and whether our hero(es) will make it out of their predicament alive.

This is, of course, easier said than done.  There are plenty of films out there, some very well made, which simply don’t engage the viewers in spite of the best attempts of the actors and directors.  A few years back I felt that way about the Tom Cruise film Jack Reacher.  As I noted in my review of it (you can read the full review here):

…the main problem with Jack Reacher and what keeps it from rising from being a good action film to being a truly great one is that there is never a point you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Cop Car.

Cop Car is a low budget film which aims, as the trailer I’m about to present below points out, to fit into an odd niche.  It attempts to be a modern day Huckleberry Finn-type story merged with a bloody No Country For Old Men-type Coen Brothers feature.  See for yourself…

While the attempt is interesting, perhaps even unique, the movie itself, unfortunately, doesn’t deliver and what we have is a suspense film that is never all that suspenseful.  We also have a movie that, like Jack Reacher, never felt like something that would happen in “real life”.

Part of the problem is the setup itself.  The movie starts with our protagonists, two 10 year old boys who may (or may not, it is never made totally clear) be running away from home.  They walk a flat field and obviously live out in the middle of nowhere.

They walk on, talking childish things, until they spot a (ta-da!) cop car parked in a ravine and under some trees.  At first they think the cops are after them (again, they may have run away from home) but when they realize the car is empty, they approach it and, after playing inside it for a while, discover the car’s owner left the keys behind.  They start the car and, soon enough, drive off with it.

MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW!

We then backtrack a little in time to find that the man who drives the car, Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon playing a very oddball character), parked the car in this out of the way place to get rid of a corpse.  He had taken the body out of the trunk of his car and dragged it to a hole in the ground where he tossed it in.  When he returned to his car, he discovers it is gone and, of course, “hilarity” ensues.

As a viewer, I found all this set up so damn hard to swallow.

Our dirty cop leaves his car behind and goes somewhere so far away on foot -and dragging behind him a very heavy corpse- that he doesn’t hear his car start up?  Considering most of the land around them is flat, wouldn’t there have been some way for our evil cop to park his car much, much closer to where he intends to dump that corpse?

If not super-near, at least near enough to hear when the car is started?

That’s ignoring, by the way, the whole rather large coincidence of two runaway boys just happening to stumble upon a cop car in the middle of nowhere with the keys inside it and an evil cop doing evil things while just out of sight.

If you can get past that, there’s also this: The two 10 year old children who swipe the car are shown to not know how to drive.  When they start the cop car, it is clearly the very first time they’ve ever started any car.  In short order they’re driving off, though they don’t even know (yet) what the “P’ or the “R” stands for on the automatic shift (they state this later in the film).

Not only do they drive off with the car, they’re soon on the road and moving about without all that much trouble.  Granted, we are in the middle of the boonies but still, this is yet another hard fact the audience is expected to simply accept.  What makes the whole thing all that much worse is that there was an easy way to explain at least this part of the movie away: Just have one of the children say their older sister/brother or mother/father/uncle has allowed them to drive their car a couple of times.  They don’t have a great skill at driving, but at least they have enough to get the car moving.

But even if such a line of dialogue existed, it still doesn’t explain our Sheriff leaving the car alone with the keys inside, especially when he’s up to no good.

What follows is essentially a chase where the Sheriff searches for his car which, it turns out, has another surprise in its trunk.  Unfortunately, the movie’s languid pace and almost comical presentation of the Sheriff (as I said above, Kevin Bacon’s character is pretty odd and reminded me at times -by his look as well as some actions- of Lieutenant Jim Dangle from Reno 911!) further dilute the suspense we’re meant to feel.

When we reach the bloody climax, our heroes, the two children, are reduced to trapped witnesses as the bodies fall around them.  Afterwards, a final car chase feels hard to swallow given (again) our heroes just started driving that day.

I feel bad knocking Cop Car like I am.  As with Jack Reacher, the film was made by people who were attempting to deliver a solid, even unique, piece of entertainment.  Unfortunately the end result simply wasn’t all that good.

Too bad.