Across a landscape of rolling hills dotted with mooing cows and a gently swaying breeze, far from the strip mall suburbia of a mid-sized Colorado town, a pair of young boys head out in search of adventure, practicing their swear words for later use. “Damn!” one of them announces. “Damn,” the quieter one nervously replies. “Goddamn!” “Goddamn.” They steadily work their way up to “fuck” after an amusing meander into the many permutations of the word “ass,” headed up by the loud-mouthed Travis (James Freedson-Jackson), and that’s when Harrison (Hays Wellford) finally balks. That’s also about the time the two would-be runaways find the abandoned cop car.
The plot for Jon Watts’ “Cop Car” sounds like midnight movie fare: two mostly good-hearted boys run away from home and find a cop car in the middle of nowhere, and proceed to take it on a joyride. But while the first act of Watts’ film plays with that idea to amusing effect —the boys bellow “this is our cop car!” as they speed...
