The myth of the Hero Cop

I was recently making a movie recommendation, and someone asked me whether the movie in question was about Hero Cops, since they currently have no interest in watching or reading anything about Hero Cops. And of course, I completely understand that.

The movie in question, Netflix’s The Rip, is a movie that reunites Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and is directed with aplomb by journeyman Joe Carnahan, who also wrote the film. It’s a true throwback of an action thriller and, if you can stomach watching a movie about cops right now, is an absolutely fantastic ripsnorting romp that is exactly the type of vintage Trash for which I was recently advocating.

If you can’t stomach watching a movie about cops right now, then I absolutely understand that. It’s tough to not think about the past several years of cops freely gunning people down in the streets, and the past hundred years or so of the police as an entity being constructed and empowered solely to oppress disenfranchised people and further the goal of white supremacist capitalism.

It was watching The Rip and this week’s new release, an even more pure Trash entry in the vein of 1995’s almost-real-time Johnny Depp/Charles S. Dutton two-hander Nick of Time, entitled Mercy. You might be more aware of it as The Movie With Chris Pratt In A Chair.

Both The Rip and Mercy are movies where a large chunk of the runtime is dedicated to solving the mystery of whether the main characters are or are not Hero Cops. The former frames the question in the form of a heist and an inside man. The latter is pure pap about whether Justice will be served better using AI or Good Old Fashioned Policing. Make no mistake: Mercy is a pretty bad movie that I enjoyed a whole lot, and its woeful calculus of which slippery slope we’re on eventually lands on something like “the only thing that can stop a bad guy is a good cop who is also assisted by a good AI.” It’s a supremely weird movie that creates a screenlife film around extremely high budget action setpieces. I’m glad I watched it. I recommend it to no one, unless you’re thirsty, as I am, for The Trash.

Both movies got me thinking, though, about the alluring filmic myth of the Hero Cop. With very few exceptions throughout modern history, the Hero Cop seems to be something that has only ever existed in movies. Beginning in the sixties, and especially in the seventies, you got filmmakers trying to subvert the Hero Cop myth with things like the French Connection, Serpico, and the Dirty Harry franchise, but ultimately these were largely just Flawed Hero Cops.

The nineties brought us closer to reality with movies like Bad Lieutenant, a grotesque and nearly unwatchable film about a truly irredeemable cop: a loathsome drug addict and powermonger; a racist abuser and a hateful little man. Maybe the most accurate portrayal of a cop on film ever! The nineties and 2000s brought us a lot of dirty cops and corrupt cops on television and in film, but as in The Departed and The Wire, these depictions inevitably strove for catharsis in the form of the dirty or corrupt main character Getting Got — often by a Hero Cop. This is the final lie of the Hero Cop genre: that some sort of justice, if only an ironic or poetic one, will at some point arrive. In reality, we understand that justice does not exist when it comes to the oppressor. So if we cannot hope for justice, we must strive for community and solidarity.

In other words, I understand if you cannot stomach watching something about a Hero Cop right now, or possibly ever again. The Hero Cop has only ever existed in our imagination, and often it has been on purpose to serve as propaganda. I think many times, like where Martin Scorsese and others are concerned, the Hero Cop in their films represents an ideal: a desperate hope that there are Good Apples that exist in real life. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, or the only way they can really cope with reality: there MUST be good in the world; there MUST be justice, or what does it all mean?

The allure of that is very real, and understandable. If you have the capacity to turn your brain off and watch an action movie about cops, you can do a lot worse than The Rip. If you want to go completely brain dead for exactly ninety minutes, I recommend Mercy.