229. Top Cop

229. Top Cop (1990)
Director: Mark L. Maness
Writer: Helen R. Pollins
From: Cult Cinema

A tough, play-by-his-own-rules cop faces off against a drug lord after his partner gets killed. But will the cop go too far?

Malone wishes he were this tough

Malone, aka Detective Al Borland, is sent to DC with his partner in case either has to testify in the grand jury trial of Johnny Costello. While there, they have an altercation with Costello and then leave with the women who were hanging out with him. Despite the fact that a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich, it’s a cop movie from 1990 so Costello beats all the charges. Det. Borland learns this shortly after discovering that his partner has been murdered. Since he’s a pain-in-the-ass to everyone he meets, the chief investigator in DC ships him back home to Arkansas.

Borland’s partner was killed by master assassin “The Avenger,” but that plot gets left in DC since Borland’s back in Arkansas. We still need a movie, though, so, for some reason, Costello sends his brother to oversee a delivery of drugs in Arkansas. Borland and his new partner (who he insists he doesn’t need) single-handedly take down the dealers and arrest Costello’s brother.

Costello comes to town with one of the women from earlier (and who Borland subsequently slept with) and Borland decides to go full-bore in attacking Costello’s network. This decision raises two questions:

1. Why does a Miami drug kingpin have an extensive network in Little Rock?

2. If they knew about these drug dealers, why weren’t the cops arresting them before?

Who cares? Costello gets angrier and angrier, there are some weak fight scenes, and finally someone plants a bomb in Borland’s car that fails to kill him. Borland takes Costello’s brother from jail and holds him hostage in a junkyard. Costello’s men try to find Borland, but he kills each of them in unimpressive ways. When it’s just Costello, Borland, and the girl, Borland tricks Costello into shooting his own brother several times, then Borland sets off a bomb that somehow kill Costello but leaves Borland unscathed.

Final twist: the woman and her friend were secretly the Avenger the whole time but the woman lost her nerve when she was told to kill Borland. Her partner is about to shoot him when the woman kills her partner instead. Then she hands the gun to Borland, says she doesn’t have the will to kill anymore, and asks if he does. Then she walks away from him, fade to black, and gunshot because a top cop like Detective Al Borland is never afraid to shoot an unarmed woman in the back! THE END

So stupid and self-important and all the more delicious because of that. Which is not to say that it looks terrible. The movie’s a step or two above Miami Connection in terms of competence. Cinematography is okay, sets are only occasionally garbage, and the acting is enjoyably bad, never incomprehensibly bad. The core problem is the script which imagines that Det. Borland is so cool and we’ll all recognize that immediately as well.

I mean, he’s not Mitchell bad, but he’s basically a doughy thug from the roadhouse.

The movie is, by the way, hilariously bad. When it tries, it fails, and it fails spectacularly. During the drug bust, someone jumps in a car and tries to drive out of the warehouse by driving straight through one of the loading doors. Fair enough. Good shot and it’s neat to see this big garage door just burst out. Only it’s a loading bay so the car comes out a few feet above the road and just kind of plops onto two cars that are parked there. And then the car explodes.

I was rolling on the floor.

Add to this that the movie begins with Det. Borland busting in on people shooting kiddie porn and blowing everybody away. We never return to that moment and it only comes up once in passing. Kiddie porn is just something happening in Little Rock, I guess.

Plus there's this great exchange after Det. Borland uses a homophobic slur twice and threatens a butler:

Chief: “We are policemen. You can’t just beat it out of them!"
Det. Borland: “Why not?”

How do you do that?

Yes, obviously I loved this movie. It’s so terrible. Everything about it is wrong and obvious and I couldn’t stop laughing. I mean, the copyright notice at the end of the credits says “©MCMLXXXX” which is wrong. They got the year wrong. God, I love this. I highly recommend finding a copy if you can. Such garbage.