Copshop

Gerard Butler has had something of a strange career in the last ten years having parted ways with romantic dramas and romantic comedies to straight-up action films. Unfortunately, this has seen him almost typecast as the action hero with the likes of Geostorm and Hunter Killer finding some success while the Olympus Has Fallen trilogy quickly nose-dived after the first film. Things looked better in 2018 with the entertaining Den of Thieves where he played a morally dubious police officer hunting a crew of thieves but is this another star going down the Liam Neeson / Nicholas Cage rabbit hole in 2021's action thriller Copshop? 

Copshop is directed by Joe Carnahan and stars Frank Grillo as con artist who intentionally gets himself arrested by Alexis Louder's cop in order to hide from Butler's relentless hitman. Unfortunately for Grillo, Butler also gets himself locked-up in the adjacent cell with the plan to complete his contract tonight. 

Carnahan has been behind a mixed bag of films with The A-Team, The Grey and Smokin' Aces but starts Copshop off with a very entertaining first act while adopting a sort of 1970s style in the opening credits. The film looks nice, the cast are all very good and the story progresses along at a good pace, as I thought midway through "This could be a fun film to re-watch with friends", but then it loses all goodwill in such a messy third act that resorts to being a lousy action flick. 

When the first two thirds of the film are spent developing the characters and the conflict between each one, there needs to be a smart and satisfying way to pay this off by the conclusion otherwise the story will feel unfulfilling and that's exactly what we have here. Apparently there were some disputes over the film in the editing room and that might explain some of these problems. Butler and the cast play their parts well but no one really comes out of the ending unscathed making this one film I can only recommend for fans of the cast.