A Fair Cop

 Copshop (2021) got a lot of attention, particularly from lovers of the screenwriting craft. It's a little movie, almost a bottle show (show with limited casts and locations - designed to be cheap to produce). It's almost an Attack on Precinct 13, but also its own thing. 

It starts with a car chase - the car in front is badly shot up. It gets a little ahead, and then dies. The driver gets out and starts walking through the desert to a casino. Meanwhile, we meet Alexis Louder, a cute young African-American policewoman. She's practicing her fast-draw while her partner gets some greasy food from a taco truck out on the highway. They get a call that there's a fight at the casino. While they are calming this down, that driver sucker punches her, and is arrested. He will be held in the isolated desert copshop of the title. 

A little while later, a drunk plows into some police cars, and he is also thrown in lock up, across from the first guy. First guy is Frank Grillo with long greasy hair and a douchy beard. It turns out that he is a witness in a federal case against the mob, and also stole a lot of money from them. Drunk guy is only playing drunk to get into jail. He's Gerard Butler with long greasy hair and a slightly less douchy beard. He has been hired to kill Grillo. If only they weren't in separate cells. Louder figures they have this handled.

Then a new assassin shows up: skinny old-timer Toby Huss, not just a killer, but a psycho. He starts shooting cops, and takes out pretty much everyone by surprise. Louder manages to lock herself in the jail section, but not before she manages to sustain a bullet wound - her own bullet, a ricochet off some bulletproof glass. Now it's a siege.

There's a lot of fun in this, if you like this kind of thing. Butler's contract killer has a lot of cute quips and pointless anecdotes. Grillo is a very sleazy, and Huss is just psycho. SPOILER - when he gets killed, he starts laughing, just can't stop. It's too damn funny. Louder is great - not a superhuman badass, but a badass nonetheless.

The copshop itself is kind of interesting. It's got that brutalist concrete interior you see in modern libraries, primary schools and other civic buildings. The exterior shots of this little complex late at night off the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere remind you of how big the southwest is, and how little chance there is of backup.