Are Cops About to Become Pop Culture's Go-To Villains?

In the 80s, the Russians were Hollywood's favourite bad guys. In the 90s, it was Arab terrorists. Could the cops be next?

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Police have always had a peculiar place in cinema history. For the most part, they are the good guys. Always standing on the right side of the law and willing to catch the bad guy at all costs (think Robocop, Serpico, Rush Hour). Yet some of the most interesting portrayals of police in film are that of rogue individuals who can't help but register their own brand of law enforcement (Dirty Harry, Die Hard, Bad Boys). There is also the undercover cop who develops a type of Stockholm syndrome, favouring the criminals they have infiltrated, causing an emotional schism to develops within their psyche (The Departed, Donnie Brasco, Reservoir Dogs). 

But in the modern landscape of cinema, the police aren't exactly the most prominent heroes up on the big screen. That role has now been filled by superheroes, leaving cops in some sort of uncomfortable void. Not only that, but in the real world anti-cop sentiment is on the increase, mostly thanks to the numerous high profile killings and shootings of black men by officers that keep happening. Therefore, given the amount of controversies surrounding them, could police become a go-to villains in film and television, like Communists and Arab terrorists have been in the past? To an extent, yes, and it has already begun to happen. 

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An obvious place to look for villains is in horror movies, the genre that has provided some of the greatest fictional baddies ever. Cops are rarely the heroes in horror films and are mostly cast as cannon fodder for the antagonist. In 1988, director William Lustig flipped that notion on its head when he made Maniac Cop, a criminally underrated film from the height of the slasher subgenre. Although the story is not particularly original it is prepared to ask the rather on point question: are you scared of the police? As a seemingly crazed police officer kills people at random in New York City, scepticism of the Big Apple's cops begins to rise resulting in one particularly shocking scene where a woman takes the law into her own hands, fataly shooting an approaching officer she (and the audience) thinks is the killer — but is actually just an innocent beat cop.

With all those themes under the surface, 2016 would be the perfect time for a remake — and one is on the way, with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn and comic book legend Ed Brubaker attached, and Universal Soldier: Regeneration director, John Hyams, set to helm it. With those sort of names working on the project we've got no idea what to expect but it would be to the film's detriment if it ignores the clear political implications of the original in favour of action and gore. 

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