Wrong Cops

"This stinks of Germany!," hollers Duke (Mark Burnham), a pudgy, crooked cop, who is one of the many characters in Quentin Dupieux's latest film Wrong Cops. The context involves a shady figure named David Delores Frank (Marilyn Manson) giving Duke a taste of the new-age, Dubstep-esque kind of music the kids are listening to today. The scene is an accurate summation of everything Wrong Cops includes - quirky characters, inane little vignettes, random bits of humor, comedic laxness, and bumping house music housed inside a seventy-eight minute runtime.

This is Dupieux's third feature, his first being the widely-scene sleeper-hit Rubber, involving a killer tire, Wrong, a damning film about a man who wanders into the strangest of circumstances while trying to find his lost dog, and now Wrong Cops, the sorta-kinda followup to his last endeavor. The film continues the line of absurdist, surreal comedy, which is really hit and miss in the long run. However, Wrong Cops has probably more hits than any of Dupieux's previous features. Rubber was great fun for about fifty minutes - the problem was it was eighty minutes long - and Wrong felt like a screen writing exercise involving vapid characters and asinine circumstances clobbered together.

Wrong Cops, similar to Wrong in several ways, flies by the seat of its pants, possessing a vague plot that can be summarized in a sentence and includes numerous vignettes on its many characters. The plotlessness helps Dupieux communicate every cockamamie thing he wants to in a relatively short amount of time, so calling the film a burden on somebody's behalf is quite the overstatement. The story revolves around a band of bumbling cops who accidentally shoot an innocent person and must dispose of his body. Now that the plot is out of the way, the story largely focuses on the antics involving Duke, a hilariously vulgar officer who deals bags of marijuana in secrecy by handing the customer the product inside a dead rat to avoid drawing attention. Duke, however, is at kind of a loss, trying to retrieve money from a customer (Steve Little) who continues to buy more and more marijuana without having the money. Another noteworthy character is Renato (Eric Wareheim), a dopey cop who barely gets by when he's left to his own wit. The only cop who seems to have sense is Shirley (Arden Myrin), who works closely with Duke.

To begin with, the film feels like a series of fifteen minute long skits fit for the lineup of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, strung together in a halfway coherent seventy-eight minute film. The spontaneity and unpredictability of this project can be commended as a rather risky effort by Dupieux but the result feels somewhat incomplete and lacking seeing as there really is no continuity in the film whatsoever. Furthermore, the anti-humor schtick is still wonky, once again leaving me at a point of confusion, as I don't know what the humor is trying to be other than as weird as can be because, as far as I can tell, the entire movement doesn't seem to know what it wants to be.

Wrong Cops, however, is entertaining, albeit disjointed. Aside from the style of humor and situational weirdness that was clearly present in Wrong, the same goes for the easy-on-the-eyes, washed out cinematography, whose color-scheme consists of faded yellow, sky blue, and plain white to make for an always beautiful look. Quentin Dupieux is easily one of the damnedest new filmmakers, and I technically haven't really liked one of his films yet, but his style, efforts to blend contemporary surrealism with comedy, along with persistency into throwing characters and plots together for "no reason" begs to be explored, for it seems genuinely fresh and unique in an age where so much isn't.

Starring: Mark Burnham, Steve Little, Marilyn Manson, Éric Judor, Eric Wareheim, and Arden Myrin. Directed by: Quentin Dupieux.

The movie is cauterizing the society we live in, using extreme and laughable characters and stories. A society where someone only cares of what he is personally experiences,his meaningless dreams, or the short term pleasures, the perverted fantasies, and the power abuse and curruption people are willing to use to archieve those. Wrapped up with the stupudity of their characters.

8 out of 10 is quite a high rating, normally reserved for great films. This isn't a great film but it is a great comedy. It's great because it doesn't try to be funny or really even try to be a story. The concept and idea are strong and funny enough. So many good ideas are ruined because they try to be something and completely fail (anchorman 2, for instance). This is not a mainstream comedy by any shout, it's fresh, subtle and very smooth. Aesthetically and intellectually. This is very brave film making, it doesn't ponder to mainstream acclaim and for that it holds it's integrity. This film simply is what it is. If you like Eastbound and down or Green Wing then i advise you to give it a go, if your cup of tea is 'how i met your mother' then forget it. This isn't for you. I'd actually like to see this as a TV series.

I'm gonna keep it brief.

I got high, watched this and laughed. I laughed at its weird, incoherent plot line and it's weird, strange characters that did weird, crude things. The review before this mentions a "stilted dialogue" which I think is an accurate description...but in a good way.

This is a very niche sort of humour - not for everyone granted. I'm not comparing it to Freddie Got Fingered, but if you're the type who 'got' that film, you'll understand this one - which I suppose is not reading into too much into it and just effin' laugh at it instead.

The cinematography was definitely a plus as well. Not groundbreaking, but actually well considered for this type of film.

All in all, its not to be taken seriously. This is someone just simply playing around and having fun.

This movie really wasn't for me, and I think that will be the case for most people. Those who do like this style may really enjoy it, but it's definitely not for your typical film fan. The movie has no real structure, plot, character development or anything, but at the same time it doesn't want to. It is totally absurdest. Nothing is believable, it has an odd feel the whole time and none of the characters are even remotely believable. Like I said before however, it doesn't want to. Its not that the movie tried to be a good movie and failed, it just didn't really try to be a movie at all. It's just a bunch of ridiculous things going on with ridiculous characters. For those who enjoy that type of thing, it may be very funny, but I didn't know what to expect when I started watching the film and it definitely wasn't what I was looking for. There was no story to really follow or get into, and since there's no real character development it isn't able to make any kind of humor based on the characters. I will say that a couple times I did laugh at just how ridiculous some of the dumb jokes were (not dumb as in bad, just purposefully random and absurd thing), but there just wasn't enough substance to the movie to leave me walking away thinking that I enjoyed the time I had just spent. I think this could have done better as a short film online or something so people could be more understanding and open to it, but since I found it on Netflix as a normal movie in the comedy section, I was expecting more. If you like adult swim and that type of totally random and absurd humor you will probably enjoy this movie. If you don't like that and are looking for a real movie with some meat to it whether comedy or not, you should probably skip over this one.