Ever since Quentin Tarantino gave us “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, filmmakers have attempted to emulate his style – the casual but brutal violence, the pervasive foul language, the bad people doing terrible things, the hip soundtrack, the cool sense of nostalgia. What they often leave out are the colorful, fully developed characters and the intelligent, engaging storytelling. Which brings us to Joe Carnahan and his latest riff on Tarantino, “Copshop” (American; 2021; action; run time 1 hour, 48 minutes; directed by Joe Carnahan, written by Carnahan and Kurt McLeod; rated R for relentless violence, language; in theaters). Carnahan, who has mined similar territory before (most notably in 2006’s “Smokin’ Aces”), has the brutality and obscenity parts down pat – everyone in “Copshop” frequently is shooting someone or being shot, sometimes multiple times and at close range with automatic weapons and somehow coming back for more, while spewing F-bombs and dialogue that is, I think, supposed to be irreverent. If you think the entertainment value of “what the f**k?” on repeat and the drone of gunfire can carry you through 108 minutes, have at it. But if you seek characters who you can care about (and there’s exactly one of those in this movie) and want some sort of sensical, meaningful story, take a hard pass.

Multiple characters come and go (and one inexplicably shows up in the climactic scene despite only a brief previous appearance), but “Copshop” is a three-hander. Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo) is a con artist on the run when he happens upon a disturbance at a Nevada casino. He sucker-punches a rookie police officer (Alexis Louder as Valerie Young) so that he will be arrested and thus protected inside a small-town police station. His genius plan is working until a highly intoxicated man (Gerard Butler as Bob Viddick) is put in the cell across the hall from Murretto’s. Turns out Viddick is a professional hitman sent to take care of Murretto. He can’t get to him until Young accidentally shoots herself, but not fatally (characters really must work to die in this movie), and locks herself inside the basement cellblock with Murretto and Viddick. A game of mental cat-and-mouse, if you can call it that, ensues, and in the meantime a comically deranged mobster hitman (a trying-too-hard Toby Russ as Anthony Lamb) and corrupt cop (Ryan O’Nan) try to break into the cellblock so that Lamb can finish his business. You might have guessed that this is one of those movies in which only one or two main characters is left standing. The story has an ending mostly because it runs out of characters to kill off.

Louder is the movie’s saving grace, but in her performance and her character. Young is the lone good cop in a station where the others are either horribly corrupt or horribly inept. Not that it matters much — most of them are killed off rather quickly. She is at the center of what is the closest the movie comes to a concept – whether we can be sure who is good or bad, what is right or wrong. Most of this theme comes in the form of dialogue from Butler, whose character is familiar in these types of things – the bad guy who thinks he’s a life philosopher. Louder is outstanding in a surprisingly layered performance (for a movie like this) as the novice cop who wants to do the right thing, the legal thing in an impossible situation. Viddick and Murretto are more stock characters than fully developed ones. Grillo has gone on record as saying he is not pleased with post-production editing that shortchanged his “colorful” performance. Take that for what you will. Just a hint of restraint would have helped Russ, whose character is as annoying as sinister and goes for laughs that are more like mild chuckles. He does shoot a lot of people, though. The climax is predictably messy, with presumably left-for-dead characters returning to be shot dead again. A post shootout scene tries to be clever in a Tarantino sort of way but feels like it was tacked on. The 1970s style graphics in the opening credits and music choices are a tip-off to Carnahan’s Tarantino wannabe status. But little that follows feels like much more than a rip-off.

My score: 31 out 100