This 1993 Burt Reynolds paycheck was developed by Ron Howard and Brian Glazer of Imagine Entertainment, with their Night Shift collaborator Henry Winkler helming a story by Arne Olson (according to the production notes, Olson conceived Cop and a Half in traffic while imagining what it would be like if the work of some police officers he was watching were done by children).
However, a good deal of the film's shape still seems to have been taken at Reynolds' hands. The location, Tampa, was selected at his urging (In Reynolds' autobiography My Life, published a year after Cop and a Half, he spoke of his desire to develop projects allowing him to live and work in his native Florida). And the story - about a paternal bond between a boy and a police officer - resonates with Reynolds' own childhood as the son of a chief of police.
Given these personal connections to the story, it's surprising how removed Reynolds' character, Nick McKenna, remains from it. A father/son dynamic feels both like the heart of this film, and also strangely absent. For one thing, we learn nothing of McKenna's personal life. Naturally he expresses a dislike of children early on, as required to establish the story's tension - but as a middle-aged man, has he ever been in a serious relationship with a woman, or considered being a father? If no, is there a special reason for it in his past? What was McKenna's relationship like with his own father? Cop and a Half is silent to these questions.
And consider the other side of this equation - the "half' - eight-year-old Devon Butler (performed by the child actor Norman D. Golden II, presently known as an aspiring hip-hop artist under the moniker Enormous). Devon is every bit the cypher Nick McKenna is. Raised by a long-working and often absent grandmother (noted communist Ruby Dee), we soon gather that Devon's parents are gone, but are never told why. Further, we have scant indication that this troubles him. Certainly, in retrospect, Devon's obsession with TV police procedurals might be seen as a longing for a father figure. But this isn't particularly obvious up front. When Devon briefly goes missing 2/3 of the way through the film, and an aggrieved Nick shouts at him for having sneaked out to buy them donuts, Devon blurts, "You're not being a very good father!" This falls like a thunderbolt, without antecedent.
A subplot is played lightly in which two thugs at Devon's school, both very much older and larger than he, extort money from him daily. He shows that despite being powerless against them, he isn't afraid, making several sarcastic quips - to which the thugs respond by turning him head over heels and dunking him in a toilet bowl. None of this seems to bother Devon as much as one would expect. Neither does the fact that he witnesses a murder, performed by a drug kingpin who receives cocaine shipments concealed in tubas and french horns when not moonlighting as a doo-wop singer.
Devon has a lot of pluck and independence- always ready with a wisecrack or an improbably precocious observation - to such a degree that his need of a father can also feel absent. When Devon refuses over several hours of interrogation to share information about the murder (including his knowledge of the killers' first names and license plate number) until he is allowed to shadow McKenna for a shift, the boy simply comes across as a petulant, Miami-Vice-obsessed brat, not a lonely child in need of a dad. Later, when Devon's life is directly threatened by the doo-wop singer, and he is offered no police protection beyond moving into Burt Reynolds' apartment, he seems to treat the situation as little more than a sleepover.
None of this is to say there aren't highlights along the way. McKenna entertainingly manhandles offenders without thought of repercussion (after driving through several private homes' wooden fences, he breaks a man's nose in front of a crowd, then leashes him with handcuffs to the back of his car to force him to run behind his bumper to the police station). In another scene, when Devon grabs a police car microphone to bark out some cop-speak, and Nick angrily switches off the amplifier, the boy folds his arms across his chest and sighs, "You give me no joy." It was an unimportant moment, but it caused this viewer to laugh out loud.
There are also moments of surrealism. A portion of the second act is taken up looking for a suspect named "Bobo". One false Bobo is an experimental artist who, in a scene foreshadowing The Big Lebowski of four years later, trusses himself to the ceiling and swings across his loft in a suit coated in blue paint to imprint a canvas. Even more improbable is the artist's incuriousness about being visited unannounced by two police officers, one of whom is an eight year old boy.
A second false Bobo is a man experiencing a domestic dispute with a character who, according to the credits, is named "Mrs. Bobo". Because Bobo had forgotten their anniversary, Mrs. Bobo is throwing plates at him in the street through her window when Nick and Devon arrive. It is Devon who is able to defuse the situation, somehow letting himself into the apartment and approaching the distraught woman to dispense wise relationship advice.
A long bar-brawl scene may possibly be the film's silliest. But its minor climax, in which a playground yard of schoolchildren recreates the "I am Spartacus!" scene from Stanley Kubrick's film for a pair of gangsters searching for Devon - then pelts the fleeing criminals with Twinkies - is also very silly.
But even as the limits of length and patience impinge upon this appraisal, nothing has yet been said of the long warehouse fight, the lengthy motorboat chase scene, the fact that Reynolds' character is shot, or the vexing fact that the entire film concludes on a scene of Nick rowing Devon and his grandmother across a lake in the park. No mention has been made of the surprising absence of race as an issue in the film - or of the internal dynamic driving this unlikely group of doo-wop-devoted mobsters.
Just one last observation will be made, because it does seem telling: namely, one notices Mr. Reynolds doing an unaccustomed amount of irate shouting in this film, whereas his laugh - one of the actor's greatest trademarks - is not heard in it. The show brings us many amusements and unlikely scenarios along its way, but like Devon himself commented, there seems to be little joy.
Finally, the song played over the credits, Joey Lawrence's "Nothing My Love Can't Fix" has lyrics bearing no identifiable connection whatsoever to the storyline. But as a piece of music it was just awful enough that this viewer found it quite entertaining to listen to.
