By andWhat makes a good movie cop? Let us count the ways. They should be cool-looking, but not so cool that it’s intimidating. They should be respected by most of the other cops in the precinct, but don’t explicitly have to be liked. They should have a vice of some sort.
They should have a backstory with one or two jagged points to propel them forward. (A bitter divorce is always good, and it’s even better if there’s an angry teenage kid around to complicate matters. Close family members with histories of alcohol and drug abuse are solid arcs. A dead kid is always a trump card.)Good movie cops should occasionally be accused of “playing by your own rules,” or something close to that — that doesn’t have to be said, but it definitely has to be understood.
The thing is, your new boss treats you horribly, your wife is a money sucking spawn from hell and the local mafia wants your head on a plate. I guess you could say, that things are complicated down here, in the middle of Brooklyn. Oh, and don't forget about writing tickets, reprimanding pedestrians & such.You're a beat cop after all. Beat Cop DRM-Free - PC Game - Full Download - Gog Games Title: Beat Cop Genre: Adventure - Simulation - Detective-mystery Works on:.
They should bend the rules every now and then, but their moral fortitude should always lead them back toward what’s good and right. They shouldn’t want to be in the situation that they’re in, like a hostile takeover in a large building or accidentally in the path of a Mexican cartel, but they should want to make the best of it. They should do all of those things and more.
That’s what makes a good movie cop.Here’s the thing, though: I don’t want to know who the good movie cops are. I want to know who the best movie cop is. So Jason Concepcion and I sorted through the past 30 years of cop movies to figure it out.
To make this task more manageable, we settled on six rules:. The Jimmy McNulty Rule: Only cops from movies are eligible. No TV cops allowed. The Sean Archer Rule: This is a thing specifically for police officers.
No federal agents allowed. No DEA, no FBI, no CIA, etc.
The Dirty Harry Rule: Movies must be from 1986 or later. That means no Serpico, no French Connection, no Bullitt, no Mad Max (people forget he was a cop), and, if you were planning to choose him, only the version of Axel Foley from after the original Beverly Hills Cop, because the original came out in 1984. The Riggs or Murtaugh Rule: You can only pick one cop per movie. We’re swapping out all the ANDs and replacing them with ORs. It’s Riggs or Murtaugh, Lee or Carter, Tango or Cash, Mike or Marcus, Turner or Hooch. The Richie Roberts Rule: Only cops who aren’t based on actual real-life cops are eligible.
If the movie cop in question is actually someone in real life, like Richie Roberts from American Gangster, then he or she is not eligible. The Alonzo Harris Rule: Only cops with a sound moral compass are eligible. There is no room in the elite class of movie cops for crooked police. Mind you, they can have a bit of dirt, but it can’t be so much that it influences the end-all picture of that person. For example, the Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel’s character in 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, is generally a degenerate, but as the movie moves forward he begins to act in a way that advances goodness. So he’s fine.
But Alonzo Harris, Denzel Washington’s character in 2001’s Training Day, stays evil for the entire movie — in fact, he only ever gets more evil. He can be admired in the lead-up Awards section, but he can’t claim any of the top movie cop spots.Before we get to the best movie cop, though, let’s hand out several awards. Best Interracial Cop PartnershipShea: My favorite interracial cop partnership is Lee and Carter from the Rush Hour franchise. The most advanced, most trenchant interracial cop partnership is Jake and Alonzo in Training Day.
The archetypal interracial cop partnership is either Axel Foley and Detective Rosewood and Sergeant Taggart in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) or, if you’re looking for co-top billing as a qualifier, then Ray and Danny in Running Scared (1986). But the alpha interracial cop partnership — the one that will forever live as the most iconic version of the template — has to be Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon. I mean, that’s a very uncreative answer, but sometimes the answer is a very straight line.
It has to be them.Jason: I’m going straight past interracial to interspecial: Matt and George from. The setup for Alien Nation — “what if one was an alien?” — is so stupid that no one had really tried it before, which made it great. The film takes place in 1991, three years after hundreds of thousands of aliens land in Los Angeles. In that totally unrealistically short amount of time, the aliens — referred to by humans as “Newcomers” when they’re feeling polite, and “Slags” when they ain’t — establish themselves in the Los Angeles area, where they become part of the fabric of the city. They own convenience stores, tend bar, become sex workers, deal drugs, JOIN THE LAPD. You know, the standard first-rung-on-the-ladder, recent-immigrant-to-America type jobs.Alien Nation pairs detective Matt Sykes (James Caan), with Sam “George” Francisco (Mandy Patinkin) a Newcomer cop.
Things are rocky at first — this movie is a naked metaphor for racism, Shea! — but, of course, lessons are learned.Important thing about this movie: Mandy Patinkin is so fire in this.
Dead serious, he delivers the greatest performance ever by an actor wearing a flesh-colored swim cap painted to look like ashy elephant testicles.A less important thing: This is probably Neill Blomkamp’s favorite movie. Best Non-Interracial Cop PartnershipJason: Kevin and Jessica from Police Story 3: Supercop.
Detective Chan “Kevin” (Jackie Chan) Ka Kui of Hong Kong PD and Interpol Officer Jessica Yang (Michelle Yeoh) go undercover as brother and sister to infiltrate the organization of international drug lord Chaibat. This movie is notable for being the rare Chan vehicle in which his female costar actually gets to punch, kick, utilize everyday items to deadly effect, fire assault rifles, launch grenade launchers, and jump a dirt bike onto a moving train, a stunt you can see Michelle doing for realsy-reals in the above video.Shea: I like this pick. I might toss Mike and Marcus from Bad Boys into the conversation, but I don’t mind conceding this one. I had the Rumble in the Bronx DVD in college. There was a bonus feature where they showed that Chan broke his ankle while he was doing the scene when he jumped onto a hovercraft as it was moving. Rather than take a break from filming, he just got a cast and then had them.
That’s beyond incredible. I promise to you that one time when I was a teacher I called in sick to work three days in a row because I had an ingrown hair. Most Awe-Inspiring Sacrifice for the JobShea: I’m going to cheat here. I’m going to break The Sean Archer Rule and take Sean Archer from Face/Off for this category.
(Archer was a federal agent, not a cop.) I just can’t figure out a way to ignore the fact that Archer was so dedicated to saving lives and defeating criminals that he willingly allowed doctors to cut his face off and replace it with someone else’s. And it wasn’t even, like, a Total Recall–style situation, where the thing he was doing was based around some technology that had been figured out and tested a bunch of times and commercialized. He was literally the first person ever to do it in his universe.
There was a very good chance he could’ve died during the procedure, and, if not died, then at least been completely and utterly face-destroyed, which isn’t that much better. I will never disrespect Sean Archer.Jason: I can’t compete with that. The scene when Travolta as Troy shows Archer as Cage that he’s wearing his wedding ring and screams is one of the most savage scenes in modern film. Most Ruthless Villain in a Cop MovieShea: I’d originally intended to talk about the snakes from Snakes on a Plane in this section, but then two things happened. First, I realized that Sam Jackson’s character was an FBI agent and not a police officer, so that’s strike one. Then I remembered that there can only ever be, and will only ever be, one true cop-movie alpha villain: Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris in Training Day. Nobody has ever been more conniving, more slithery, more intimidating, more blackhearted, more villainous than Alonzo.Jason: Fun story: One summer break, back in college, I snake-sat my friend’s 7-foot ball python, Dr.
I was familiar with the animal, having seen it at my friend’s apartment many times. He would allow it to slither freely around his bedroom, a practice that I emulated in mine. Iguana was fond of wrapping its shiny, red-brown body around my bedpost, where it would sit for hours and hours, a tight ball of muscle, never moving.After a few weeks, I got so comfortable having this reptile out of its tank that I would forget I had it out. So, this one day, snake on the bedpost, I step out for a few minutes.
When I come back: snake gone. I’m like “Oh, shit.” I get down on the carpet to look under the bed and I see his tail — just a few inches of the end — protruding from a hole in the floor where the radiator pipe came up from.
I grabbed it and tried to work him loose, but there was no way. Iguana slithered its way down into the guts of the house. So now I had to tell my friend that I lost his beloved snake AND tell my housemates that there was a snake, answering to the name of Dr. Iguana, loose in the house. And, I totally would have, except that snake showed up in the downstairs bathroom a little while later (like, errrr, a week?), saving me from embarrassment and probable eviction.Shea: Jason, you and I have different ideas of what a “fun story” is.
That sounds a bunch more like a “death story” or a “disaster story.”Jason: Anyway, Waingro from Heat. That’s my pick. The movie sets him up as an ex-convict, armed robber, murderer, and snitch, then all of a sudden, two-thirds of the way through, reveals that he’s also a serial killer.
Best Use of a Cop Skill in a Cop CapacityJason: Everything Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs do in Miami Vice. This movie being a Michael Mann joint, everybody — from the street snitches to the federal agents — is preternaturally competent at their given roles in the narco-ecosystem.
Crockett and Tubbs are the SEAL Team Six of narcs. They rob drug smugglers while posing as Haitians to set up a meet with the Colombian suppliers.
They expose a leak in the FBI using Tyrion Lannister–style countersurveillance techniques. These guys are better fake drug dealers than the real drug dealers! Rico flies planeloads of yay out of the Colombian jungle by shadowing the radar signals of other aircraft before transferring the loads to fast boats in the Caribbean.
And when it’s cop time, boom, they can execute a hostage rescue in a trailer park on, like, five minutes notice. Crockett and Tubbs are cop skills personified.Shea: Fair argument. But give me literally everything RoboCop does in the 2014 RoboCop remake whenever he scans the environment and computes all the information. It’s the ultimate cop move. I figure every detective of all time has wanted to be able to just walk up to a scene, stare at it for a minute, then insta-solve the crime.
RoboCop does that, and also: He’s dressed like a fucking robot, which I will never get over. I’m very sad that we do not have RoboCops in real life. I’m also surprised that we haven’t seen any other Robo-based movies. I would watch literally any Robo movie.OH SNAP. Jason is there a pornographic version of RoboCop? Is Robocock a thing?
Because hoo boy.Jason: Opens private browser window. Googles “RoboCock.” Most Impressive Exhibition of a Non-Cop Skill in a Cop CapacityShea: Jason, let’s just go ahead and give this win to officer Larvelle Jones because there was a scene in Police Academy 6 when he found himself in a karate fight against someone better at karate than him, so he pretended to be a robot to beat a guy. Shea: That’s a very great line, yes. But the thing that’s so great about Mason Storm’s is that HE’S IN A ROOM ALL BY HIMSELF WHEN HE SAYS IT, HAHAHA. He’s just sitting there staring at a TV that’s not on.
He has this memory of a conversation that happened between Senator Trent and some bad guys from months ago, and Senator Trent mentions going to the bank, so Mason sits there in silence for a couple of seconds, and then he just says that shit to his own memory. It’s an A1 move. Anyone can say a one-liner to a bad guy seconds after the bad guy says something. Only Mason Storm can say one to a bad guy several months after the bad guy says something.