Bon Cop Bad Cop
Directed by Eric Canuel
Written by Leila Basen,
Alex Epstein, Patrick Huard,
and Kevin Tierney
Starring Colm Feore,
Patrick Huard, Pierre Lebeau, and Rick Mercer
Classification: 14A
Rating: ***
REVIEWED BY STEPHEN COLE
Imagine a bilingual cop buddy movie starring a French-Canadian Nick Nolte and an English-Canadian Pierre Trudeau and you begin to understand the potential fun of Bon Cop Bad Cop, a way-over-the-top comic murder mystery starring Colm Feore and Patrick Huard.
No, make that a trilingual buddy movie, as francophone characters in the film, set in Montreal and Toronto, often communicate in a blustery Franglais ("c'est weird, eh?"). But Feore's character, Detective Martin Ward, an Upper Canada College aesthete given to turtlenecks and tweed, speaks French in an elegant murmur that evokes images of Sorbonne cafés and strolling accordion players with Charlie Chaplin mustaches.
Feore famously played Pierre Trudeau in the TV miniseries Trudeau, and he demonstrates the same magisterial calm here, breezing into Montreal to help hothead detective David Bouchard (Huard) in the investigation of a hockey murder that took place at the Quebec-Ontario boundary.
A hockey murder? Yes, well, it turns out some demented fan has had enough of what the big-money boys have done to the great Canadian game, and so is crosschecking villains into the Big Penalty Box in the Sky. Hockey fans will happily recognize the bad-guy victims here, a group that includes former Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington, the peddler who sold Wayne Gretzky off to the Los Angeles Kings, and diminutive, butter-smooth NHL president Gary Bettman. To make sure everyone gets the joke, the character modelled after Pocklington goes by "Pickle-ton," while President "Butt-man" is a toupéed midget.
Coarse humour, for sure, and Bon Cop Bad Cop fires more than a few jokes wide of the net. Still, it is a pleasure to watch a Canadian film that handles its audience with such rough, knowing affection - a broad, crowd-pleasing movie pitched to an audience, as opposed to an arts committee.
Director Eric Canuel ( Nez Rouge) isn't afraid of offending anybody, or ransacking Hollywood standards for ideas. Some jokes are so bold that they take our breath away - for instance, Detective Ward's offhand comment that stowing dead bodies in a car trunk "is a Quebec tradition," a scalding reference to the FLQ's murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte in 1970.
And the film wins us over in an early scene lifted from the 1982 movie 48 Hours, where Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy cause a furor by crashing a redneck bar. Here, Ward and Bouchard venture into a working-class Montreal tavern and the Toronto detective instigates a melee by batting his anglo eyelashes at a French barmaid.
The payoff for the 48 Hours send-up comes later, when Ward and Bouchard catch hell from their gruff captain (Pierre Lebeau) for fouling up an investigation; a cop buddy movie cliché made entertaining by Captain Le Boeuf's haircut (a cubist comb-over worthy of René Lévesque), along with the fuming officer's crippled English rant: "H'ward, you are off da' suitcase! . . . "
Bouchard's response is to wonder aloud how Le Boeuf can speak both French and English with a bad accent, in the manner of Jean Chrétien.
As with all buddy movies, Bon Cop Bad Cop succeeds on the strength of the leads' rapport. Screenwriter-star Huard ( Les Boys) plays the Nick Nolte role - the shambling, chain-smoking Bouchard - with a weary, attractive grace. Feore, meanwhile, exhibits a feline vanity throughout, taking evident pleasure in negotiating tricky French verb tenses or properly preparing a gourmet meal. The French-English odd couple is fun together without ever being cute. They don't enjoy their relationship; the audience does.
At least Quebec audiences did over the Aug. 4-6 fin de semaine, giving Bon Cop Bad Cop the opening-weekend box office record for a Quebec film with $1.4-million, according to distributor Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm.
The English-Canadian version, which differs from the Quebec print by only a few lines of dialogue, is out this weekend. English audiences should enjoy all the same scenes that went over big in Montreal and Chicoutimi. Except maybe the sequence in which Detective Bouchard grows furious over the anti-Quebec comments by national TV sports commentator Tom Berry (Rick Mercer, standing in for Don Cherry), yanking the sportscaster by his colourful tie so that his head paddleballs off a studio desk.