Crown Vic is a strange choice for a spotlight film at Cinejoy in 2021, because it feels like a cop movie that could’ve been made in 2019. Actually, it was made in 2019, so it’s already had a theatrical release. It sticks out from some of the other movies because boy does it have a budget for blood spatter and car chases, and that’s because it cost $3 million to make and was produced by Alec Baldwin. It made approximately $4,000 in theaters, which seems like the kind of return on investment that would necessitate a change in career. Nothing about this movie is unpleasant, though it does seem like a movie that doesn’t need to exist at best and at worst really misses the point about telling the stories of policing and the policed.
If you think I’m going to get up on a soapbox and talk about all the ways in which this rookie-cop-learns-what-Real-Policing-is-on-his-first-ride-along, I don’t really think we ought to be talking about a movie literally released two years ago at Tribeca, but for some reason, this is where we are. Two cops have a Real Busy Night executing suspects and being propositioned for sex and blow jobs by LA’s finest white women–you know, cop stuff. The fact that most of their suspects are white probably takes the sting off the fact that LAPD has been so riddled with corruption and bad cops that it is under federal oversight as a result of a consent decree. Probably my favorite LA buddy cop movie in recent years is The Nice Guys from 2015. It’s a bit of a wild ride, but it doesn’t treat the audience dumb, so you need to stay on your toes. This past year in captivity, I also finally had a chance to see Under the Silver Lake (2019), which I was a late-comer to and I’ve been agonizing over whether I could write about that movie for months. I wondered at the time if my enjoyment of that movie would’ve been increased by seeing it in theaters instead of on my computer at home interrupted by cooking dinner and finding dessert. There are some flaws, like the way that Andrew Garfield is a bit of a skeez, but the bones of Under the Silver Lake, the magical realism, the hard-boiled crime noir, the LA mythology, are all things I can vibe with. Which is all to say, why are we spending any time at all talking about this movie from two years ago?
Honestly, if you want to see a good cop killer movie, why don’t you pick up Chadwick Boseman’s 21 Bridges blockbuster with the Russo Brothers? Why don’t you dip back into the glory days of Denzel Washington and watch literally any of his movies between 1990 and 2008? Why are we spending any more of our lives chasing the ghost of David Krumholtz around, hoping he’ll strike gold again?
We’re better than this. We’ve got better stories to tell. We don’t need to live in the past and no one should be encouraging Alec Baldwin to make any more cop movies.
