| In the Netherlands, the tile is “Bad BOA’s” where BOA is an acronym from the Dutch for a type of law enforcement officer. It is meant to make you think of Bad Boys even though Netflix changed the English title to Almost Cops. Whether they change the title or not, this movie is still a lazy knock-off of a mix between Bad Boys and 21 Jump Street. | | 2025
Directed by: Gonzalo Fernandez Carmona
Screenplay by: Kenneth Asporaat, Michel Bonset, Murth Mossel
Starring: Werner Kolf, Jandino Asporaat
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This is a buddy cop action comedy that is painfully unfunny and every part of the plot and action is borrowed from a much more famous American cop movie, whether it’s Die Hard, Bad Boys, Lethal Weapon or the Jump Streets. It’s not even a satire of that genre, it’s just straight up copying but with worse writing, worse acting and worse editing. I think a main appeal of Netflix’s international productions is seeing the culture of other countries. This has nothing to do with Netherlands’ culture, this is a generic Americanization.
All the characters are very broadly defined, and the few with details are nothing new or original. Jack is a community service officer (CSO) who is living in the shadow of his father who was killed on duty. He’s then paired up with Ramon, a former detective who accidentally killed his partner, twice; that’s two partners that are dead because of him. And I think that’s supposed to be funny. While this unlikely pairing – (yes, I am aware how lame that saying “unlikely pairing” is but this movie is just so focused on pointing out how different they are, it’s as if they don’t know it’s the most cliched part of a buddy cop comedy) – are out in the community ensuring old ladies pick up their dog’s poop and cyclists don’t speed, they accidentally uncover a drug smuggling ring. And from there discover – wait for it – that some cops are corrupt. That reveal was intended to be one of the big twists of the movie.
The tone is all over the place. They are trying to seriously present two low-level cops take down both drug smugglers and police corruption, and then just throw in jokes. Like Ramon killing former partners, oops. Every joke is a lazy, poorer written version of the jokes that make Bad Boys fun. It’s not fun here, it’s not organic, and these filmmakers are unable to merge any of the serious consequences of the plot with lame attempts at comedy.
The buddy cop action comedy isn’t even a good genre in the first place, and isn’t something that needs to be dumbed down, but that is what they have done here. Almost Cops has taken all of the famous American cop movies, moved them to the Netherlands, and then Americanized them with stupid jokes and bad writing. Why?
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