COP AND A HALF: NEW RECRUIT
Canada, 2017, 98 minutes, Colour.
Lou Diamond Philips, Lulu Wilson, Janet Kidder, Amitai Marmorstein, Wallace Shawn.
Directed by Jonathan A.Rosenbaum.
In 1993, Burt Reynolds starred in a comedy Cop and a Half. The plot concerns a young boy who wants to be a policeman, plays a detective with a friend until he becomes involved with a murder case and a child-disliking policeman, Reynolds, is assigned to work with him.
Actually, this sounds a bit like the present film made almost 25 years later. This is a Canadian production, and the new recruit is a precocious, very precocious, little girl (who is very earnest about her acting and performance and so not always convincing and fairly often irritating).
Her father had been a policeman killed in action and her mother wants to be protective. The little girl, Lulu Wilson, has a friend at school, African- American, who eventually steps in to help with the climax, stating that he is her Deputy.
Lou Diamond Philips takes on the Burt Reynolds’ role, having been suspended from active duty because of his hesitation in shooting a suspect who holds a hostage, the perpetrator going on to commit other crimes. He looks scruffy, dresses poorly, eat scruffily and hangs about wanting to be back in uniform. He encounters the girl, clashes with her. She teaches him a thing or two – and most of the police at the precinct who are fairly IT illiterate.
The problem in the town is a series of eruptions, rather comic in their style, with a fake police badge accompanying doggerel verses on a pink piece of heart-shaped paper. Things blow up, people get covered in slime… Eventually, there are bombardments by drones on the climax, at the town’s annual parade, which involves a large drones zapping everything.
The police are being taunted their inefficiency. The Mayor is also targeted. Nobody has any leads until the little girl suggests it is someone associated with the police. They work out that it is someone who was a failure in police training and is getting revenge.
The captain, female, is fairly hard on the hero but, eventually, has to acknowledge the expertise of the little girl. There are two associate police officers who act like kids, an ingenuous chorus. At headquarters, there is also the IT nerd who is able to infiltrate computer programs, even the academies, to find out who the likely suspect is. When the police go on a hunt, following a clue, they find a drone expert, of Asian origin (and audiences may gasp from moment that he is being targeted, only to find out that he is not the villain and he himself mentions the Asian prejudice).
The little girl has stayed with the nerd at headquarters during the raid and, just before she does, the audience will probably realise that it is the nerd who is the villain.
Our hero is restored to the police force, he has a mobile phone and knows how to text, eat healthy food… And, if this film was successful, there is ample opportunity for a sequel.
