The Best Cop Movie You've Never Seen

As a veteran of seventeen years in law enforcement, I think I can make the following statement with some authority: Most cop movies are total bullshit.

The worst are generally big star, overhyped orgies of gunplay and car chases, featuring dudes with haircuts that would make the average supervisor puke on your boots. Wearing designer sunglasses and badges on chains around their necks, they casually kill left, right, and centre. The relationship of real police work to these films is marginal at best. Yet people do seem to love them.

Even the best cop films, like David Ayer’s intense End of Watch, are, despite getting the lingo and the look down pat, a little…overwrought.

Only a few films, have in my mind ever come close to capturing the essential nature of the work. One such film is William Friedkin’s brilliant The French Connection. In the film, the detectives unravel a gigantic drug conspiracy (based on a true story), only to have the bad guy get away at the end, after Gene Hackman shoots one of his own guys. That’s a shit sandwich fuckup any cop can relate to.

You see, most triumphs in law enforcement are only partial. They are games won by forfeit, trophies with an asterisk. I caught a murderer once, only to see him released as a result of somebody else’s fuckup. So, I can relate to Popeye Doyle’s frustration. At least I didn’t shoot the wrong guy.

The best analogy I can use for the work is that it is akin to fighting an underground fire. You can contain it, but only nature can put it out. It can burn for decades, despite your best efforts. But if you throw up your hands and walk away, you will regret it.

We’ve all heard of The French Connection, and if by some chance you still want to see it after I spoiled the ending, I highly recommend it. The car vs subway chase is one of the most exciting scenes in American cinema.

But another film, one you likely haven’t heard of, captures the dichotomy of futility and purpose at the heart of police work. That film is Joseph Pierson’s Evenhand.

Evenhand follows two very different cops in the fictional Texas city of San Lovisa. Ted Morning (Bill Sage) is a former jock, gregarious and charming, with a “Let’s get this shit over with” type attitude to the work. Rob Francis (Bill Dawes) is a gentler soul, rebounding from a divorce, and determined to understand the people he polices.

Sounds like the buddy cop formula, right? Not in the hands of Pierson and writer Mike Jones. Instead of car chases and shootouts (There is gunplay, but it is a necessary culmination to two ongoing storylines, coming towards the end of the film), we get the routine, repetitive bread-and-butter of police work. A couple who cannot solve their problems without calling the police. Parents who cannot handle their children. Supposed adults who need a referee.

This could be tedious, but it isn’t. The fun of Evenhand is watching the very different approaches of Morning and Francis, and the tension that eventually evolves into grudging, mutual admiration. Francis, ever the optimist, is fooled once too often, and begins to harden. After a series of fuckups, culminating in his losing his gun to an off-kilter local troublemaker David Mather (Lee Stringer), Francis drunkenly confides in Morning that he’s a “shitty cop.”

Morning tells him he is wrong, that he possesses a talent for dealing with people that Morning lacks. “The trouble with people is, I say something, then they say something back.”

Yes, that’s the trouble with people all right.

While Francis at first comes off as something of a wimp, an impression dispelled when he finally confronts Mather, Morning leaves the initial impression of a power-tripper unconcerned with justice. He tasers a harmless vagrant carrying a cinder block while Francis looks on in horror, because “You can’t be walking around with heavy objects.” But gradually, we see his tormenting of a local teenaged addict named Toby (iO Tillet Wright) is actually a ham-handed attempt to help the boy.

But Morning cannot save Toby, and eventually his efforts result in a failure which serves as the film’s denouement. As in so much of the job, the film’s conclusion proves the truth of Morning’s sagacious statement, “You can’t be everybody’s friend.” Yet Morning himself forgets this.

The film’s serious themes are punctuated by the laughter that is one of the best parts of the work. In one scene, Morning upbraids a young man with a suspended license, then eats his paper temporary permit in front of him, while Francis collapses in laughter.

I always wanted to do that with a passport, but I was afraid I’d get heartburn.

Evenhand is equal parts sad, funny, exciting, and depressing. It is exactly what a cop’s life is. And for that reason, it is my favourite cop movie.