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★★
Directed by: Anthony Wright
Written by: Anthony Wright, Luke Codling
Starring: Rod Glenn, Jonathan Cash
Writer/Director Anthony Wright’s Future Cop serves as a nostalgic wink to the countless action flicks featuring indestructible heroes tackling a plethora of bad guys single-handedly. He takes a page out of the classic “interrogation” scene between a hero tied to a chair and the villain of the movie. We all know those ropes won’t hold tight.
According to the synopsis, Wright sets the story “in the crime-filled streets of Future City.” The cop (or Future Cop), played by Rod Glenn, is roped to the seat while the villain, known as The Boss (Jonathan Cash), sneers and says stuff like, “You caused me a lot of trouble.”
The interrogation room is mostly dark except for overhead lights that fall like a spotlight on both parties. Wright chooses to keep a jovial mood. Nothing is meant to be taken seriously. The actors go over-the-top in their portrayals. Look closely, and you can hear them laughing behind their “acting” faces. Glenn and Cash do not play as movie-hero and movie-villain. Rather they behave as two friends having a blast by play-acting as super-cop and gangster. The vibe I got took me back to that memory with one of my friends, where we used to perform as superheroes and supervillains. We imagined ourselves as characters from Die Hard, Terminator, Spider-Man, and other such films and (over)acted the hell out of our senses.
Since Future Cop is a parody, the fight sequences are choreographed with a dose of playfulness. The punches land as cotton balls hitting a solid surface. The impression you get is that of a bunch of kids wrestling over a candy than two adults engaged in a fierce fight. Future Cop is purposefully campy, and when seen exclusively through this lens, it remains frabjous.
The issues emerge when you examine it in its entirety, which is not sufficient, to begin with. This four-minute short can be fully elucidated in one or two lines. The rest is filled with puerile fights. Future Cop needed more meat. What you get here is something you end up making for your own amusement. There is nothing wrong with making a film or a short according to your desire, but we have already witnessed the events shown in Future Cop a million times in other (and better) films. And as mentioned earlier, it’s a page out of an action film. What you get is just one part (the face-off), and that too is compressed under a few minutes. Here is a film that feeds on bare-bones.
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