Verdict
Summary
Bon Cop Bad Cop isn’t anything we haven’t seen a million times before but the buddy banter is entertaining and there are some slick action beats too.
Plot: Two policemen (Colm Feore, Patrick Huard) from different Canadian provinces must work together to solve a crime.
Review: I’d heard about Bon Cop Bad Cop for years but never actually sat down to watch it; I wish I had done so sooner as it is a highly entertaining Canadian action comedy.
It’s basically exactly the same story as the first Lethal Weapon with two mismatched cops having to work together to solve some murders. One of the cops is Ontarian and the other a Québecois so you can imagine the buddy banter which is all very Canadian and frankly hilarious for the most part. The people who are murdered are all involved in hockey and are (reluctantly) given tattoos by the killer; we discover that the murders are quite personal but by the end of the movie it doesn’t really matter who the murderer is.
Our two leads played by Patrick Huard and Colm Feore bounce off each other well with Feore playing the straight man and Huard as the cool one who gets all the girls.
Despite being pretty formulaic in terms of story there is enough action and humour to keep things moving; it is a little long though and could maybe have had cut a few minutes here and there but the story is always engaging.
There is a great cameo from Rick Mercer who is a particularly obnoxious TV host (big stretch) and when he and David Bouchard (Patrick Huard) come to blows live on air hilarity ensues.
The action scenes are slick and the movie is satisfyingly violent with some nudity thrown in for good measure too. It also has one of the most satisfying bad guy deaths I’ve seen for a while which left a smile on my face.
I don’t know what it is with modern TV shows and movies where the coroner character always has to be annoying and talks too much but this movie is also guilty of it; stop doing it as it isn’t funny!
Overall, Bon Cop Bad Cop isn’t exactly original but giving it a Canadian angle gives it some great humour and our two leads are very likable; there’s some decent action too.