You know what makes a good cop movie great?
Accents!
Also superior acting, clever scripting, and stylish direction. But mostly, the accents.
As someone who loves a good cop movie (or a bad cop movie, or cop movies in general), I was pleasantly surprised by Welcome To The Punch, mainly because I barely heard about it.
Which makes sense, I suppose. While it has a boatload of familiar faces, it doesn’t exactly have a star to sell it. Luckily, it doesn’t need one. It’s just a solid, impressive cop thriller that’s smarter and better than it probably needed to be.
We begin in London, where Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy), A Cop That Doesn’t Play By The Rules is hot on the trail of notorious criminal type Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong), who has (offscreen) successfully pulled off One Last Job. After a car and motorcycle chase, Lewinsky corners Sternwood, only for Sternwood to get the drop on him and shoot him in the leg before making his big getaway.
Three years later, Lewinsky has gone from Cop Who Doesn’t Play By The Rules to Cop Who Doesn’t Like To Make Waves, Ever. His partner Sarah Hawks (Andrea Riseborough, who is having a hell of a year) tries to get him off the bench, with little success.
But Lewinsky mans up when family matters force Sternwood to come out of hiding and return to London. Lewinsky is determined that Sternwood won’t get away a second time.
And from there, you know the drill… good guys, bad guys, shootouts, blood money, etc, etc et al.
Look, it’s not going to get any points for originality. We’ve all seen this before. But, as with all good movies, it’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it. And Welcome To The Punch is a cut above the rest.
Firstly, as you can probably tell from the cast, it’s a British movie, so don’t go in expecting the kind of Hollywood pyrotechnics a movie like this would usually have. They’re way too reasonable across the pond to blow the big bucks on a flick like this. Which is not to say that the movie is cheap looking. On what I’d imagine is a fraction of the budget of what the U.S. would spend on a movie like this, relatively green director Eran Creevy makes it look as good as the big boys. Its slick, hypperreal visuals make the dirty dealing and gritty street action seem way more inviting than they should be. Indeed, you might confuse the first five minutes of the movie with a particularly violent car commercial.
While the action isn’t as big or as frequent as in most cop movies, Creevy sure as shit makes it count. His shootouts are intense and well choreographed, and filmed and edited in that recently rare way where you can actually tell what’s going on.
But really, the thing that makes the movie stand out isn’t the action at all, but the writing and the acting. The plot is fairly old hat (though there are some inventive twists and turns), but there’s a level of nuance to the characters and the situations that most action movies don’t even begin to attempt. It gets political in a rather interesting way, especially from an American’s outsider standpoint. Also, it’s one of the rare action movies that actually makes it’s violence count.
It’s a movie where death is not dismissed with a wisecrack. Almost every character is developed enough that when they die, you feel it. Death is not a plot solution, it’s the actual end of a human life, and the consequences are dealt with in a surprisingly real way. Until the exciting conclusion, of course, which becomes a shooting gallery and may or may not invalidate a clever gun related plot point, but it seems churlish to chastise a smart movie for going a little dumb and delivering a good, action packed ending.
Even Lewinsky’s leg injury, which in most movies would only return to when it was convenient to the plot… even this is played real. In real life, you just don’t heal from a wound like that. Physically, or mentally. And to the movies credit, (and to the credit of James McAvoy’s performance), they give it the proper resonance to what have very easily have been a throwaway element.
Really, McAvoy is quite good in this. He’s an actor I find variable in his performances, but he brings his “A” game here. He is backed up by a murderers’ row of talent, none moreso than Andrea Riseborough. In many ways, she is the heart of the movie. Mark Strong is Mark Strong, which is to say he’s awesome. There is a quiet scene in a morgue between him and McAvoy that might be one of my favorite things I’ve seen all year. Peter Mullan, David Morrissey, Johnny Harris, Daniel Kaluuya, Natasha Little… right down the line, there’s not a loser among them.
In conclusion, there’s not a lot of cop movies out there anymore. It’s kind of a lost art, or at least it is here in the states. I feel like it’s my duty to point out the really, really good ones.
Which this is.
So see it.