Cop (1988) is a James Woods movie. The effortlessness with which James Woods plays James Woods makes every James Woods movie a vignette of his real life. Whenever you see James Woods onscreen, you witness a true story.
James Woods really hunted vampires in the American southwest (Vampires). James Woods genuinely lived as an animated Hades for a time (Hercules). What about Cat’s Eye? That’s how James Woods quit smoking. James Woods is the cinematic equivalent of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. Every single one of his movies is true.
Except Videodrome. We’re not sure about that one.
But it probably happened…
Cop
The movie starts with James Woods establishing his dominance over a police station. He zips from desk to desk, making sure everyone does their job by doing their job for them. His pants? Baggy. His shirt? A shade of gray. His hair? Immaculate.
A call comes in about a murder, a murder so bad it gets a Peckinpah reference.
In a whirling dervish of coffee steam and cigarette smoke, James Woods is on the case. Viewers assume he drives to the location. It’s more likely he carried the car. His jacket shoulders are tailored like Lorraine Gary’s padded ensembles in Jaws IV for a reason.
James Woods glides like the offspring of a tiger (who had a forbidden love affair with a panther) through the crime scene. He finds a puddle of blood cockroaches use for a swimming pool and knows he is on the right track. A dead woman hangs from the bedroom ceiling.
James Woods searches for clues. You know what he says when he discovers a circled personal ad for sleazy sex? James Woods says, “Bingo.”
A stuffy critic might feel the urge to mock such cliched dialogue, but he won’t. You know why? Because this is James Mister-Falconing Woods. He doesn’t do cliche dialogue. He speaks the truth of his life, and if you can’t handle that, you probably wear control-top panties.
Good Cop, Better Cop
Yet, James Woods is not all steel.
Well, he is…but he is carburized steel, in that he has a soft core to enable him to be approachable by mere mortals. We see an example of that in the next scene.
James Woods tells his daughter a bedtime story about criminals he busted. The story is peppered with swear words and a lesson. It’s a bad world out there. You need to develop claws to fight it. Galvanized with James Woods’s loving wisdom, his daughter is ready to punch sharks.
Of course, the wife doesn’t like it. She thinks James Woods will bruise the child’s delicate psyche. James Woods sets the record straight. You can’t tell kids they are entitled to happiness. Disillusionment leads to them becoming hookers, and innocence kills. There are no white knights and happy endings.
I need to stop writing for a minute. I’ve got something in my eye…
At this point, you might think James Woods would call it a day. Nope, he puts on a black leather jacket and goes out to bust a criminal. Said criminal is a dude in a Camero with a floozy. The criminal makes a move on James Woods’s partner, Charles Durning.
Big mistake. James Woods empties his revolver in the criminal’s chest. He asks Charles Durning to stick around and wait for the ambulance, so he can take care of more important matters.
“You blow away a broad’s date, least you can do is drive her home.”
Chivalry is not dead, ladies and gentlemen. James Woods is simply the last practitioner.
Cop A Feeling
James Woods tracks down the mailbox of the personal ad. A woman who will develop future lower back problems arrives to check it. The woman is played by Randi Brooks, who was the babe with the weird voice in The Man With Two Brains. (That means The Man With Two Brains is a true story, as well, since it takes place in the James Woods universe.)
James Woods talks to the woman about the murder. She informs him that she is a hooker who deals quaaludes and facilitates swinger parties in apartments she squats in.
James Woods doesn’t care if she aardvarks in a bathtub full of cocaine. He just wants the killer. He wants to know how Brooks knew the slain woman.
Brooks relates the two of them met in a library. The victim was checking out sex books because she wanted to write a book about sex. Apparently, the victim was greatly interested in the sex.
So, Brooks said, “Why don’t you come and observe my swinger parties?”
Ah yes, it is a familiar tale of how lasting friendships are made. Brooks said the victim also thought someone was following her. James Woods wants a list of Brook’s clients.
“They’re at home.”
“I’ll come get them.”
“I’m sure you will.”
Such a sad display of flirting on Brook’s part. James Woods likely gets tired of women throwing themselves at him with the velocity of a baseball thrown by Randy Johnson. If there is one chink in James Woods’s armor, it is his weary tolerance of female adoration.
Copland
James Harris directed Cop. Harris came from the school of Stanley Kubrick, working on films like The Killing, Lolita and Paths of Glory. Harris also wrote the screenplay, based on the novel Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy.
Ellroy is known as something of a grump. No doubt he would get along fine with James Woods. Game recognizes game, and neither of them have time for sunshine blown up posteriors.
Harris’s work on Cop is adequate. He recognizes technique should be a transparent curtain. He lets the story and performances carry the day, not a bunch of hoity-toity artistic expressions. Harris did nice work on the screenplay, as well. Ellroy is something of a dense writer, but Harris boiled the screenplay down to the essence of Ellroy.
As a result, one can tell James Woods treated Cop with relish. He sinks his teeth into the role and makes sure the viewer experiences what he experienced throughout the story. For example, James Woods lets us see a glimmer of humanity in his performance.
From his shaking hands to the callouses he deliberately built up over his emotions to enable him to navigate a world of dangerous, dirty, dastardly crime, James Woods shows he is no robot. He is made of flesh and blood, and he keeps a lid on his stress for the benefit of those around him.
Hero, you say. Yes, that goes without saying.
Cop and Robber
With the depth and richness of all of this, you might think I spoiled ninety percent of this movie. That’s silly. No one can sum up what James Woods brings to the table of a complete film in such few words. I’ve only spoiled the first thirty minutes of Cop.
I’ll leave the rest unspoiled, so that James Woods can take your hand and personally carry you on this journey, seated comfortably on the saddle-like shoulder pads of his jacket.
One pleasant surprise Cop contained is that I realized I had never watched it before…except for one scene. I turned on the movie randomly as a kid and witnessed a man (I had no idea it was James Woods at the time) discover a body and be affected by its state.
It was too much for me at that age, so I shut the movie off. Yet, it made an impression on me. The idea that horror could affect even a hard man stuck with me. It was a treat to finally discover the movie that scene came from. It, along with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Robert E. Howard influenced my own interest in noir and led me to invent my own private detective hero.
So, not only is James Woods a force. He is an inspiration. No wonder he is so good at slaying vampires.
Coping With Cop
But don’t get too comfortable with the idea that James Woods is so easily categorized. Just when you think you got him pegged, you witness him surreptitiously check his watch and roll his eyes as a woman bears her soul to him. James Woods can dispense kindness, yes, but don’t test his patience. He contains multitudes, and his view of the big picture may preclude your bid for his attention.
Lesley Ann Warren is another person in Cop, playing a cog in Jame Woods’s investigation. She does fine. They all do fine, carried by the wind of James Woods’s wings. Yet, Cop is not a perfect film. A 1980s cop thriller should have a car chase. Plus, it would be nice if the villain had been more of an overt threat, rather than a shadow lurking behind the scenes.
Alas, we can’t have everything. Everything is for James Woods, and we can be glad that we got to see another one of his adventures play out onscreen. We are richer for the experience. True story.
