COP CAR (2015) **

I was a huge fan of Jon Watts' Clown and Spider-Man:  Homecoming.  Because of that, I was excited to see this flick, which he made sandwiched in between the two.  Even with the presence of the always entertaining Kevin Bacon at the wheel (so to speak), Cop Car left me cold.  It's not bad or anything, it's just that there’s not a whole lot to it.

Two runaway kids (James Freedson-Jackson and Hays Wellford) stumble upon an abandoned cop car and decide to take it for a joyride.  Minutes later, its owner, a dirty cop (played by Bacon) comes back and finds it missing.  He then takes off in hot pursuit of the kids. 

Part of the problem is that the kids aren't that likeable.  When we first meet them, they are literally trying to say every curse word they can think of, which doesn’t quite endear them to the audience.  It also doesn’t help that neither Freedson-Jackson nor Wellford are strong enough performers to really get you to care about them.  A lot of that has to do with the script, which doesn’t do a whole lot to flesh their characters out.

Bacon is incapable of giving a bad performance, but he never ratchets up the menace.  Like the kids, his character is underwritten, and he seems more like a plot device than a flesh and blood human being.  Perhaps if he tweaked his persona a bit more and made the cop truly scuzzy, it would've upped the suspense.

Another problem is the story itself is pretty flimsy.  It almost feels like a short film that’s been indifferently padded out to get to an eighty-seven-minute running time.  Even with a relatively short length, it feels much longer.  

If I had to pick a section that worked the best, it would be the middle sequence where Bacon discovers the car has been stolen.  Once the kids find what's inside the trunk, the movie sort of flatlined for me.  The finale is lackluster too.  Ultimately, Cop Car spins its wheels for far too long before finally running out of gas.