Officer Downe (2016)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Kim Coates, Tyler Ross, Meadow Williams
Directed by Shawn Crahan
Crime doesn’t stand a chance, and more than likely your attention span won’t either in Officer Downe, the latest film from director Shawn Crahan (Clown from Slipknot), and it’s safe to say that if there’s at least the minimum amount of a chance that you could suffer from epileptic seizures due to photo-sensitivity, you might want to sit this one out.
Based off of the graphic comic, the film focuses on Officer Downe (Coates – most notably Tig from “Sons of Anarchy”), an LAPD cop who fights to uphold the law, sometimes to the death… over and over again.
You see, this particular defender cannot be killed – okay, well yes he can, but thanks to some backdoor scientific work in the basement of the police department, he’s routinely resurrected and sent back out to duty – apparently there is no belief in vacation time with this guy. He’s been shot, blown up, and basically decimated on every level, and thanks to the clean-up team assigned to him, he’s brought back with the same set of directives: Shoot em’ up, lock em’ up, clean em’ up.
No one truly seems to know a lot of information about the undead officer, or how he’s regularly redeployed to do some damage (and sadly, it doesn’t really get touched upon either), but his methods are effective, if not gory and costly to the department. The good officer’s main adversaries? They’re known as the Fortune 500, and let me tell you, on the odd scale, this group of animal mask-wearing kooks doesn’t even register, and the mounted human heads in their executive boardroom concretely solidifies that claim. A baby-faced newbie named Officer Gable (Ross) is assigned to “stand by” while Downe wreaks havoc upon the city’s scum, and his level of perplexity on this matter echoed mine.
So, we have this massively-armed “peace” officer attempting to reel in everyone that runs afoul of the law, including a drug kingpin named Headcase Harry (Slipknot’s lead Corey Taylor), and a nun with a love for guns named Mother Supreme (Williams). If the aforementioned gallery of criminals standing in Downe’s way isn’t enough, then how about we call in a teleporting ninja assassin to do the real dirty work?
All in all, the film is an absolute blitzkrieg of gunplay, explosions, and enough sexual innuendos to fill a squad car, all set against the backdrop of what truly looks like a heavy metal video display (appropriately enough). Sad thing is, all the unrestrained chaos can get a little tiresome over the movie’s 90-minute run time, and if full-throttled cinema isn’t your cup of tea, then this film is definitely not for you.
Also, for a movie titled Officer Downe, you would have hoped that we could have seen more of the previously mentioned lead character; yet, he appeared to be somewhat of a second-in-charge to the other characters chewing up screen time. Downe as a competent and believable savior is a stretch, with nearly every interaction with the bad guys resulting in himself getting killed again and again, and it’s lather, rinse, repeat – kinda gets old after a while, honestly. There are attempted laughs to mix up the insanely violent instances, but the funnies fall short, and we’re left to mop up the mess over and over again – one step forward, two steps back I guess you could say.
Overall, there will be some willing to overlook the skewered storyline and schizophrenic cinematography, but when all’s said and done, this Officer needs to be put on desk duty for the foreseeable future.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
