Wrong Cops

WRONG COPS
Writer/Director:Quentin Dupieux
Starring:Mark Burnham, Eric Judor, Steve Little, Marilyn Manson
Availability:DVD Widely Available
Rating:

 
                                             


    Quentin Dupieux is one of the most original, unusual voices in modern film.  I remember seeing his film Rubber for the first time at a midnight screening at one of our local arthouse theaters.  It was a film that I had mixed feelings about.  I loved the absurdity of it, and I thought the first half was absolutely brilliant.  Somewhere along the way, though, I felt the film lost steam, and started to ramble.  Basically, it was a great short film padded out to feature length.  His follow-up, Wrong, was probably an even weirder film, but I felt it was much more successful.  It was funny.  It was strange.  It was one of my favorite films from 2012.

    Quentin's new film, Wrong Cops, falls somewhere between his two previous films.  It's definitely a hard film to pin down.  When it began, I felt a bit uncomfortable, because the film just wasn't funny.  As it moved along, though, I realized this isn't really a movie that's meant to be funny in the conventional sense of the word.  This is a movie that combines the absurd surrealism of Quentin's previous work, and mixes it with a sort of meta-humor that would feel right at home on a late night Adult Swim line-up.  This is Quentin having a lark, doing a little screwball exercise to fill the gaps between his more serious work.  If you can appreciate the oddball approach and oft-kilter humor, it will entertain you.  However, I can promise a lot of you will absolutely HATE this film.

    Basically, Wrong Cops is a series of vignettes involving one of the most incompetent police forces imaginable.  Every cop in this movie is either a total loser or some sort of piece of shit human being.  Officer Duke (Mark Burnham, reprising his same role from Wrong) is first seen selling marijuana inside of dead rats.  He then encounters a teenager (Marilyn Manson in a brilliant bit of stunt casting), who he ends up taking as a hostage.  While being held captive in Duke's apartment, he forces him to listen to this obnoxious bit of techno in a way of showing the teen what "good music" is.  After the teen escapes, Officer Duke tries to shoot him, but accidentally shoots his neighbor instead.

    The problem is that the man in the backseat just won't seem to die.  It's also revealed that he has really good taste in music.  This ties in with a very amusing subplot involving one of the cops who is a wannabe musician.  His music is terrible, but he enlists the help of the dying man to try to bring it to life.  Adding to the insanity is a cop with a gay porn past, Eric Wareheim as a cop who gets off on sexually harassing every woman he encounters, blackmail, and a bunch of money buried in a backyard.  The movie just becomes more and more absurd, and by the final act, it has completely fallen off the rails into full blown insanity.

    Quentin shoots the entire movie in a very soft-lit way that recalls a lot of the television cop shows it seems to emulate in a lot of ways.  There are amusing cameos from brilliant actors like Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie.  Mark Burnham and Eric Judor are absolutely brilliant in their roles.  The humor is incredibly scattershot, like a series of sketches with no punchline.  There's not a likable character in the bunch.  The film's mixture of dadaist musings and low-brow humor can be jarring.  It's a film that I don't know how to recommend, or even to recommend it at all.

    Basically, if you're a fan of Quentin's previous work or fans of this abrasive sort of non-comedy, then this comes highly recommended.  However, if you are unfamiliar with the absurd worlds Quentin creates, I'd be very careful how I approach this one.  Personally, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I'm also a fan of this sort of anti-comedy.  I'm one of those weird fuckers who considers Freddy Got Fingered to be a misunderstood piece of dadaist brilliance.  This is a film with true underground spirit.  I'm not even sure how to rate the damn thing, so I'm just going to split it right now the middle and let you decide if it sounds like your type of thing.  It's like Reno 911 made for and by sociopaths.  If that sounds like your thing, and you have a taste for the peculiar like me, I'd say definitely check it out.  You won't see anything like it for a long time, or at least until Quentin makes another movie.

    Until next time, my fellow freaks and weirdos.