Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Cop Movie’ on Netflix, A Fiction/Fact Hybrid With The Human Spirit And Corruption On Its Mind

Intriguing, immersive, and disorienting, A Cop Movie (Netflix) finds filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios (Museo) agitating on the fringe between documentary, fiction, and reality to deliver his narrative about police officers at work in Mexico and the broken system they’re forced to operate within. 

A COP MOVIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A Cop Movie begins as so many of the genre have, from a dash cam’s point of view as radio chatter emanates and the landscape of a Mexican city at night is introduced. It’s an angle familiar to any depiction of contemporary policing, and director Alonso Ruizapalacios uses it here to lull the viewer into a certain sense of complacency. We think we know what we’re getting ourselves into. “Dispatch, 809 – I can confirm that a Z-14 will be required promptly” – and seconds after officer Maria Teresa Hernandez has made that call and exited her vehicle, she’s forced by circumstance into delivering a baby. When the Z-14 finally arrives, hours later, the medics are indifferent. “It’s already born. What do you expect us to do?”

It’s a sequence that illustrates the flawed system of both public and police support that seems to surround every action in Mexico, one that Teresa connects back to her rookie year on the force 17 years before, when blatant graft and on-the-job corruption stared at her with unblinking hostility. Teresa is heard in voiceover as she patrols; occasionally, she speaks directly to a dash cam reversed to face the driver. What’s going on here? And then Teresa is breaking the fourth wall as she leans on the driver’s side door of a police interceptor of her cop dad’s era, a boxy Dodge Diplomat with two male officers inside, clad in their awkward, bulky vests. This is the night her father was shot in the line of duty, and that time, the ambulance never even showed up.

In its next chapter, A Cop Movie introduces Officer Jose de Jesus Rodriguez Hernandez, who goes by Montoya. He takes a more jaundiced view of his position, and the litany of little bribes and cheats that are part of the job. The admiration he felt for his older brother, patrolling the streets of Tepito with his boots and machine gun, seems far away now. Depression grips him, and drink, but his spiral of self-destruction is broken by an unlikely new relationship. As it turns out, Montoya and Teresa are a couple. Their superiors, half sneering, call them “The Love Patrol.”

As it wavers between documentary and dramatic form, A Cop Movie finds yet another layer of subversion as Teresa and Montoya attend Police University in Mexico City and film their experience with cell phone cameras. And by its final chapter, with reality and fiction in a hopeless tangle, there’s only one fact that counts. “The police officer is vulnerable in every sense. Nothing is guaranteed for us. No protection by the command and no protection by the citizenship. At the end of the day, the corruption doesn’t stop.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Luke Lorentzen’s 2019 documentary Midnight Family followed the Ochoas, who operate a private ambulance service in Mexico City, dealing nightly with the sick and hurt who either can’t or won’t pay for emergency support. Meanwhile, the 2013 documentary The Act of Killing linked dramatization to documentary for a seamless, often searing recounting of the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66.

Performance Worth Watching: Ruizpalacios is up to some mischief-making with his camera here, inserting a wealth of artfully framed shots that range from a subtle shift of focus in what’s perceived as the body cam of an officer to something professional like an Alexa Mini LF, to cinematic wide-angles that illustrate emotion and narrative simultaneously. And somehow, the director aligns these moments with something as simple as a FaceTime selfie.

Memorable Dialogue: Fellow officers Teresa and Montoya are recounting one of the defining moments of their courtship.

“They sent us on a raid to Cuautepec, and off we went,” Teresa recalls.

“I remember that day,” Montoya says. “You climbed out back in the truck. You climbed out back, and I saw you through the rearview mirror. And you were eyeing me, like, ‘Damn!'”

Sex and Skin: There is a brief, unrevealing scene of sex between Teresa and Montoya.

Our Take: There’s a thrilling sequence in the third chapter of A Cop Movie, after Teresa and Montoya have been revealed as a couple, but before anything else. The two cops are grabbing a quick hot dog when a crime occurs before their very eyes. There’s no rest or lunch for the civil servant, and leaps out of their cruiser in foot pursuit as Montoya guns the engine to cut off the perpetrator. The chase is on, and we settle in for the inevitable quick cuts between the hood running for his life and the cops determinedly giving chase, their equipment jostling as they call for backup. Teresa even slides across the hood of their police car in a moment that might as well be in slow motion. As insistent, propulsive jazz builds on the soundtrack, the Love Patrol pins the bad guy in a subway before subduing him with a clothesline he never saw coming. Now, that’s some cop movie filmmaking, right? Sure, so what’s it doing in a single camera documentary?

This is the sleight of hand at the heart of A Cop Movie, where the realities of what Mexican police officers face on the job and in their personal lives are portrayed with a jaded exhaustion at the sheer scope of corruption that envelops everything, but also with the dramatic flair of actors at work. The film’s message — “It’s been really tough for people to trust in the police again; no one cares if a police officer dies” — could very well have been represented in a straightforward documentary. Such a film would have undoubtedly included many of the same moments portrayed here, from traffic stops to smoke breaks. But with his meshing of reality and dramatic daring, Alonso Ruizapalacios lends an eeriness to the proceedings that disorient the viewer and demand we stop and think about what’s at stake.

Our Call: STREAM IT. A Cop Movie is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, a hybrid of documentary and drama that highlights well its notes of how corruption tarnishes our value system.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch A Cop Movie on Netflix