Crown Vic

Larry Wallis’s “Police Car” single came out in 1977 under Stiff Records. The first verse goes: “I’m armed, and dangerous/I prowl the streets at night If you see a creep In your rear-view mirror It’s a hungry black and white ’Cos I’m a police car.” Like this song, the one I am about to delve into is also about a police car; it’s written and directed by Joel Souza and I would classify it as more of a self mocking cinema. Let me paraphrase a bit two cops: the first one is an old grumpy male with fixed ideas and the second one is a freshly inducted male with a lot of misplaced lunch toils of hope. Plus, the second one’s wife is pregnant kinda funny, huh? So, there are these two gun toting bank robbers that we do not give a rat’s ass about. In all honesty, they were armed with military grade automatic weapons… and now we have to figure out what the hell where the cop’s chances of catching them. Quite laughable, right?

Apart from the exceptional acting of Thomas Jane as the saavy detective, ‘Crown Vic’, a movie that is named after the default LAPD issue Ford model vehicle, offers little to the discerning viewer. Watching this feels more like a punishment than a reward, I would rather listen to that Larry Wallis song 36 times over than having to endure this for an hour and 47 minutes. Souza portrays Janes’ Ray Mandel engaging in multiple power exploits the scene that concludes with Ray telling a guy to drop pants in public while he says, “Now you have been searched, see the difference?” is, of course, a monstrous act that culminates in cold-blooded murder while new partner Nick (Luke Kleintank) is forced to consider the moral boundaries of such actions.

Too bad things have to be like this, but they really do. Souza does not touch on the motto of LAPD, ‘To Serve And Protect’ just to get some humor out of it. There is no serving to be done or protecting, neither is there a need to attempt to provide citizens with any type of security. “It’s war!” a delusional civilian yells at the uniform officers during a service station stop.

Indeed! Children are employed as drug couriers! Feeling helpless as the “armchair lawyers” with phone cameras have made his task infeasible, Ray comforts himself by teaching Nick the art of evading body cameras and radio transmissions blissfully. This makes malfeasance more effective, or should I say, necessary. And spare me the detail about Newport Bay’s drunken, puke spewing entitled chicks, who are complete nuisances.

Being a cop has transformed completely from what it used to be and indeed, it should have been. “They’re doing away with all the old Crown Vics and within two years, none will remain” Ray passionately cried. For the rest of the movie, we simply listen to: “You surely want a freaking piece of this?” and “Stop pointing the weapon. DOWN!” “Never gonna happen!”

In Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Charlton Heston’s straightforward cop character once suggested, “A policeman’s career is only simple in a police state.” The philosophy of this aspiring-to-fascist movie truly does remind me that there is no harm in a police state. Well, out there, it is a true jungle.

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