Movie sets are always crowded, relative to what ends up on the screen. Stir in a few dozen journalists, and it was no surprise to find a location shoot for Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 tipping into the red zone for film-set congestion. Director Alain Desrochers had to almost jump in the air to signal actor Patrick Huard, who was kneeling on the floor with a half-dozen guns pointing at him, and many more cameras pointing at the guns.
Someone said, “Action!” and Huard, with his hands behind his head, let fly with a salty rant in Québécois, meant to let the suits with the guns know just what he thought of their intelligence. But they couldn’t know that because this scene, shot in a foyer of the old, now-vacant Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, was supposed to be happening in an office of the U.S. State Department.
That’s right: The resolutely Canadian film franchise has, for its sequel, slipped over a border less symbolically fraught than the one between Quebec and Ontario. But the central odd-couple alliance, between the vrai gars Québécois David Bouchard (played by Huard) and WASPy Ontarian Michael Ward (Colm Feore) remains the engine that drives the film.
It has been 10 years since Bon Cop Bad Cop became a Canadian smash hit by mining comic drama from cultural misunderstanding. Huard, who wrote the scenario for the original and is both scriptwriter and co-producer for the sequel, said he would have liked to bring his fractious heroes back to the screen sooner.
“But I think it’s going to be better [this way],” he said, during a break after numerous takes of the brief guns-drawn scene. Ten years have passed in the characters’ lives as well, allowing for a different kind of character development, he said. Their roles have changed, too: Ward has moved up to a more senior position in the RCMP, apparently having made up for the mayhem and mishaps seen in the first film – not that that’s about to stop.
“The mythology of Bon Cop Bad Cop,” Huard said, “is about these two guys trying to do good, and almost all of their decisions putting them in a worse situation. It’s always their fault.”
Parts of the first film played like a comic crash course in Two Solitudes 101. There will be less of that this time, Huard said: “It’s more about the personalities now.”
“They’re much closer now, and their partnership is stronger,” Desrochers said. “But in the first scene they’re fighting, with fists and everything.”
In the original movie, the cops came together through the investigation of a psychopathic killer whose identity was veiled at the start and who, in classic fashion, surfaced for a very personal showdown in the final act. For the sequel, the bad guy is a Mafioso with respectable connections, and he’s out in the open from the start.
“My character has to bring danger to the story,” said Noam Jenkins, the young Canadian actor cast as the heroes’ nemesis. “If you can get people to feel that, you have room to do other things.” In a film that runs as much on laughs as on thrills, Jenkins has no intention of playing a heavy with no comic interest. The humour will come by hitting the right tone, he said, and by finding room for comedic beats in his dialogue.
Desrochers, whose experience in action movies includes Nitro and the forthcoming Nitro Rush, said he “could not say no” when the offer to direct Bon Cop Bad Cop 2 came up a year ago. “It’s a supercool movie with a lot of action and comedy, and it’s pretty rare in Quebec that we get to work with an important budget.”
The new film will cost nearly $10-million, which, adjusted for inflation, isn’t much more than the budget for the first one. It’s a tiny sum in Hollywood terms, but Desrochers said the action sequences he’s seeing in the rushes will surprise the audience. “I’m surprised myself by what we’re doing,” he said.
There’s still the question of whether a decade is too long a wait, and whether Bon Cop Grey Cop, as the sequel could be called, will catch the country’s fancy as aggressively as the first one did.
Huard said he was chuffed to be asked recently for an autograph by a couple of boys who would have been toddlers when the first film was released. In the age of DVD and of films streaming over the Internet, the past and the present in cinema are often closer than they appear. And Ontario and Quebec are still right next to each other.