Copshop (2021)

Joe Carnahan's grindhouse feature film Copshop is set in a remote Nevada police station but has as much to do with law and order, strictly speaking, as Swan Lake has to do with ornithology. The film's set up is a mysterious bad man (Frank Grillo) is being chased by a mysterious worse man (Gerard Butler) and Officer Val Young (Alexis Louder) is the only person standing between them and an even worse man (a brilliantly unhinged performance by Toby Huss), and the whole posse is in the sights of a bad cop. The rest is layer-upon-layer of vulgarity and balderdash between and among the officers of the station and the prisoners.

Carnahan and co-writers Kurt McLeod and Mark Williams have included red herrings and complications that are not fully explained or resolved; they just energize some action and place characters on needed markers. In other words, they're plot devices. The writers do seem to be interested in demonstrating how seemingly unstoppable criminal psychopaths can be, until confronting the proper force. They aren't extolling lawlessness in this brutal and bloody modernized Western showdown. Rather they are resurrecting the Lone Ranger mythos and merging it with Black Girl Magic.

Young, who is terrific as the Lone Ranger, is introduced in the film performing gunslinger quickdraw tricks for her boss (Chad L. Coleman of The Wire, The Expanse, Walking Dead) that will come in handy during the film's final reel, as everyone who has ever seen a movie would expect.