Buddy cop comedies used to be ten-a-penny, and a lot of them were great – Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour, 48 Hours, Tango & Cash, the list goes on. The genre isn’t as popular as it used to be, despite the continued success of the Bad Boys franchise and various other well-intentioned efforts, including 21 Jump Street, The Nice Guys, and even stuff not technically about cops but following a similar odd-couple template, like Heads of State. A half-decent movie in this genre should be a winner through novelty value alone, but if Almost Cops proves anything, it’s that there is such a thing as too safe, too derivative, and too confused for nostalgia alone to be enough.
The safety you can see everywhere. Gonzalo Fernández Carmona’s film is totally unwilling to challenge expectations in its plot, characters, or even content. The story wants to set up twists, but doesn’t want to be too complex to require any effort on the audience’s part. It wants serviceable action and unchallenging development.
The broad strokes you’ll certainly recognise. Idealistic Rotterdam Community Service Officer Ramon (Jandino Asporaat) wants to protect his community and honour his father’s legacy as a local hero, but he finds himself partnered with a near-rogue former detective named Jack (Werner Kolf), who has been demoted after aggravating his bosses by refusing to stop looking into the case of his murdered partner. Needless to say, both Ramon and Jack have a connection – Jack’s ex-partner, Kevin (Yannick Jozefzoon), was Ramon’s half-brother.
So, to recap, that’s a chalk-and-cheese central pairing with radically different personalities but a shared goal of finding out what happened to the one guy they both have in common, setting out to expose a web of crime and corruption to bring the perpetrators to justice. See what I mean about derivative?
The confusing element is harder to explain. Almost Cops simply cannot decide what type of movie it wants to be. It straddles that awkward middle-ground between the R-rated for-adults sensibilities of buddy-cop classics and the overt fun-for-all-the-family theatrics of broader fare. Sometimes it wants to be a serious drama about crime, family, and institutional corruption, and sometimes it wants to be a dopey, almost slapstick comedy. It has the constantly referential attitude of a meta project without realising the irony of constantly name-checking movies that are much superior to it. You never quite know where you stand.
It’s hard to articulate how distracting this stuff is in practice. We’re talking about relatively straightforward chase scenes, for instance, being randomly peppered with moments of odd eccentricity, or quasi-serious dialogue being undermined by a totally unrelated gag. It’s bizarre. I can’t say I’m overly familiar with Dutch cinema, so perhaps it’s a cultural thing, but I strongly take leave to doubt it.
Almost Cops has no new ideas for its central pairing, either. One is idealistic and excitable but determined to abide by the rules at all costs, while the other is jaded and impatient and willing to take the maverick route at every opportunity. It’s an extremely familiar dynamic that never takes off because of how simplistic and unambitious the writing and plotting are. Neither character has any interesting quirks or foibles; they simply work their way through a heavily signposted plot, reacting as expected to each development, occasionally distracted by some sort of ill-advised weirdness designed to make Almost Cops more of a comedy than it would otherwise be.
I wish there was more to say. I love this genre, and have done forever, but I don’t love it so much that I’m willing to reward a lame imitation just for trying to rejuvenate it. Everything here – from the writing to the performances to the action and comedy – is half-arsed in the extreme, resulting in a movie that not only fails to capture the audience’s interest but also sullies the memory of the many better films it’s attempting to pay homage to.
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