Crown Vic

For all its familiar elements, Crown Vic is a well-made and strongly acted effort showing real talent on the part of its writer-director.

A respectable if non-revelatory cruise through a familiar terrain of mean streets and men in blue.

Souza and his cast explore a familiar milieu, and though they fall short of saying anything startlingly insightful about it, they do a fine job of making it feel real, and even vital.

You can’t fault the actors, who play the sadism for tough, two-fisted realism, but Crown Vic (a title that makes no sense; there’s nobody named Vic in it) is still a cheap copy of Training Day and a crash course in lock-jawed cynicism 101. Not to mention the worst P.R. the city of Los Angeles has had since the Rodney King scandal.

Crown Vic isn’t a bad picture. It’s just too unexceptional to stand out.

Aside from a rock-solid performance by Thomas Jane as the grizzled cop, Crown Vic, which is named after the Ford model car that is the default of the LAPD black-and-white, has very little to offer the discriminating moviegoer.

Souza’s feature plays like an amalgam of the tropes of numerous TV and movie police procedurals.

The name of the movie refers to a car Ford Crown Victoria, famous for police patrolling. So, the movie is about one night of LAPD patrol crew. The idea is far from being new. There are many stereotypes in the script: it's a veteran policeman plus a rookie, and it's his first patrol shift. Actually, there are almost all possible stereotypes there except two. One being they did not eat donuts (but that maybe because donut places were closed at night). Two: unlike in the majority of Hollywood films, police were not trigger-happy. I don't want to waste your time listing those which *were* in the movie. There were so many co-incidents for one night that the script looked highly improbable to me. Performances were decent but nothing breath-taking. Overall, the movie was not bad, quite watchable as a piece of entertainment. Do not expect to be wow'ed.

Crown Vic (Protect and Serve) ’19 – Curious but Rough Ride If you’re looking for a movie to convince you not to be an American policeman this is it. Unrelentingly downbeat all the way, this cynical ultra vicious movie continually goes for the worst in humanity - from a manic rogue cop (easily the worst possible example) to the drug destroyed wife of an ex-cop, to a little girl being held from her family for untold purposes, and rampaging cop killers, shooting up any that come their way, etc, etc, (all in a nights work) While it may give us a look into the dregs of society – it wallows in its negativity, failing to offer its audience any glimmer of hope (no wonder they stayed away) Performances are all good and the contrast between the young rookie and grizzled vet works most of the time but with an unrelenting barrage of hopelessness - wrapped up in a script by writer/director (Joel Souza) who, unfortunately, seems incapable of stringing sentences together without every other word being a vulgarity. While so-called ‘trendy’ Hollywood types might speak like this it also assures it becomes tiresome for many others. At least it has a pounding, moody soundtrack. In the seventies, films like ‘The New Centurions’ served this theme with some reasonable justice, and even though times have certainly changed, can it truly be as blatantly radical as we are being bludgeoned with here.

(Mauro Lanari) Compared to "Training Day" (Fuqua 2001) it has the merit of not having a Denzel Washington who overacts in what may have been his only villain role, however the routine of more or less borderline cop patrols has itself become a television and film routine.