I am sometimes tempted to put Gerard Butler's recent career in the same bucket as that of Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis, who both have been known to act in c-level schlock for a paycheck. However, looking back on Butler's filmography of late, I really think I'm not being fair to old Leonidas. While his recent films could be described as schlocky for sure, none of them are really comparable to the true garbage you might see if you watch every film that has Willis' face plastered on the poster (no offence intended, I'm sure if I was in Willis' shoes I'd do the same). In any case, this movie corrected my misjudgment. It's good. Really good in fact. With a little more money behind it, I think it actually had the potential to be great. The writing might be the stand-out here, with a set-up that is so simple and effective that, as an audience member, you are immediately excited to see how things play out. The pacing keeps that excitement building, ramping up appropriately throughout the lean runtime. While there are definitely some over-the-top/cliché elements toward the end, none of them are deal-breakers. The acting is also strong across the board. Toby Huss has a ton of fun in his role and while Gerard Butler's performance is very much on brand for him, it's a brand that he excels at and it's entertaining as ever. There's also some solid humor sprinkled in throughout.

While I wasn't able to find any info or estimate regarding the budget for this film, Joe Carnahan's previous film, Boss Level, had a reported budget of $45 million. I haven't seen that film, so I can't directly compare, but I suspect that Copshop was made for significantly less than that and unfortunately the limited budget is recognizable at various points throughout the film. Some effect work is a bit rough and the filming of certain scenes seemed detrimentally budget driven. The handful of night scenes also stood out in a bad way, all looking like they were done with a night filter of some sort (this could be a stylistic choice, but it looked odd and cheap to my eyes). Luckily, none of these issues were major enough to meaningfully detract from the film's successful elements and at the end of the day I'd recommend this to anyone looking for a solid action/thriller.