Cop Car

Rated 3.0

When a couple of runaway boys looking for danger find a seemingly abandoned sheriff's car in the woods, they take it for a joyride, but the dirty cop that the vehicle belongs to will do anything to get it back. This marginally effective speck of a thriller is getting a lot of attention because co-writer/director Jon Watts has been tapped to drive the latest nail into the coffin of cinema by re-rebooting the Spider-Man franchise. There's certainly a visual confidence to the first third of the film that hints at greater things ahead for Watts, but the storytelling is pretty flat and predictable, and the entire script feels like a placeholder that someone forgot to eventually write. It's nice to see the perennially underrated Kevin Bacon get a juicy headlining role here as the killer cop, but he goes so big and broad that his performance seems almost undirected. D.B.