Review by Katrina Couzens of Good Bad Cop presented by LaunchPad
If you’re a sufferer of worry dreams, the plight of John Doe, thrown into an absurdist nightmare when his interview to join the police force gets hijacked, might feel familiar. In fact, Good Bad Cop bears a lot of similarity to a dreamscape—a handful of memorable moments, and ideas that promise to suck you in, but a lack of structure, plot, and character development that leaves you scrambling to make sense of the experience once you emerge.
To start with the positives, the cast gave great physical performances. The slapstick when it appeared was hilarious, and there were many good gags throughout the show. The costumes added a lot, as did the immersive pre-show, welcoming audience members as they arrived to the “conference”. If Good Bad Cop had simply been a series of thematically connected comedy sketches leaning on these strengths, I would probably have come away satisfied.
That’s the crux of the issue: Good Bad Cop overpromises. It sets up a mystery which it has no interest in solving, and introduces a core set of characters who it has no interest in developing (“they’re just crazy” is not a compelling character motivation). As a result, we fall into a flat, repetitive cycle of the same characters having the same interactions in slightly different places. By the third cycle, I was bored. By the fifth, I was simply waiting for the end.
The end reveal that much of the show was improv only solidified for me that the underlying writing was half-baked. Ideas that could have been fleshed out in advance were apparently swept under a “she’ll be right” attitude to storytelling which does a disservice to the writers themselves as well as to the art of improvisation (which, done well, would have showcased the obvious talent of the performers rather than simply patch over gaps in the show’s development).
I’m not a fan of lolrandom humour. Maybe if I was, I would have enjoyed Good Bad Cop more. Untied from an expectation of coherence or meaning, there is plenty to laugh at. But for me, that’s not enough to recommend it.
