Indie film’s other Quentin — as in Dupieux, the French one — returns to Rubber form with Wrong Cops. The uniformed comedy rights the wrongs of Wrong, Dupieux’s similarly titled effort of 2012. That lost-dog story extended the auteur’s absurdist bent well past the axis marked “tolerability” and into the realm of the near-unwatchable; tangentially tied to it, this movie is much better.
Wrong Cops‘ title more or less doubles as plot description, as Dupieux’s loose, aimless narrative leaps with the whims of a short-attention span from one boneheaded officer of the law to the next. We meet, among others:
• De Luca (Eric Wareheim of anti-comedy duo Tim and Eric), who misuses his position of authority to get women to expose their breasts;
• Holmes (Arden Myrin, Bachelorette), who is less interested investigating an apartment’s murder scene than leftovers in the fridge;
• Sunshine (Steve Little, TV’s Eastbound & Down), who spends his days behind the desk, except this day, spent trying to repay a debut to his pot dealer and suppress evidence of his gay-porn past;
• and Duke (Mark Burnham, a Wrong vet), who is that dealer, storing inventory in his police cruiser’s trunk and utilizing rat corpses as a delivery system for the goods.
Their encounters with one another run second to their dealings to those with the public, most notably shock rocker Marilyn Manson, out of makeup as a cop-harassed dweeb. No matter the scenario, each of which I assume relies heavily on improv, the style of humor at work is the kind that reads pancake-flat on the page, and thus dependent upon the performers to take it to any degree of laughter — even if only internal.
The men and women in blue rise to the challenge in Wrong Cops‘ establishing scenes and those directly afterward. The initial fizz dissipates when Dupieux force-connects all his jesters through a musical thread that seems less about advancing toward a conclusion and more about pushing digital downloads of the soundtrack by Mr. Oizo, Dupieux’s electro nom de plume. From there, laughs are spotty.
Definitely not everyone’s idea of a police farce, the divisive Wrong Cops will hit most with those predisposed to the art of the non sequitur. Whether that’s you, Burnham is a real comedic find, like the lost love child of Bill Murray and David Koechner. —Rod Lott
One year before he nearly shot an eye out in 
Early in 