Cop Car takes an ambitious shot at combining the kid's adventure film, like Stand By Me or The Goonies, with the kind of dark, rural thrillers currently eating up the indie scene (Blue Ruin, Cold in July). The synthesis proves an interesting and engaging one, even if both genres feel a little shortchanged in the end.

Cop Car has a simple premise: kids find an abandoned cop car and soon get embroiled in the reason it was abandoned in the first place. The kids, Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford), play the kind of annoying pretend games you probably played as a kid: hiding behind things, being stupid, “running away,” and imagining Mario Kart as a stand-in for driving lessons. At first their fun is whimsical, as they figure out the sirens and tentatively bump their new cop car through cow pastures. But soon enough Cop Car turns for the darkly comedic, as the boys wave guns about and call each other pussies for not swerving around on the highway fast enough.

Cop Car Trailer

But we know what the kids don’t (thanks to a jarringly placed flashback): the cop car has a body in the trunk and belongs to a corrupt local sheriff (Kevin Bacon) involved in all sorts of vague nastiness. Bacon’s half of the Cop Car plot is a Coens-Brother blast, as he comes up with clever ways to track down the missing patrol car without revealing his scheming to fellow police officers.

Bacon’s Sheriff Kretzer is such a fun character because he’s a villain without a master plan, forced to improvise against children. We see him panic, miscalculate, and nearly fall over wheezing as he runs away from the scene of his murder cover-up.

Cop Car eventually builds to a dramatic stand-off on a country road. And while it’s not the tensest gunplay you’ll ever witness, it effectively ratchets up the tension to the expected orgiastic wave of violence.

But when you realize that this final stand-off is pretty much Cop Car’s end it’s hard not to feel a little let down. It’s understandable why Sheriff Kretzer’s crimes are never fully explicated (in one hilarious moment he reveals a bug out bag stash full of Jason Bourne-worthy gear like gold bars and fake IDs), because it would distract too much from our young main characters. But the boy’s plot also ends up getting stymied a bit as well, as Cop Car locks them in the back of the patrol car and strips them of anything to do for much of the climax. The very end finds its footing again, paying off the emotional investment made in these kids and their lives.

Fun enough to recommend, Cop Car is like an 80’s Amblin movie shoved through a hardboiled paperback press.