Kindergarten Cop

I brought up the recently-deceased Ivan Reitman in my briefs post yesterday, and mentioned that I had Kindergarten Cop, which Reitman directed, on my DVR. So last night I sat down to watch it and do post on here.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John Kimble, the titular cop. At the start of the movie he's in a Los Angeles-area mall tailing Cullen Crisp (Richard Tyson). Crisp is a drug dealer well known to Kimble, and Kimble has been trying to get the goods on Kimble for some time. Crisp goes into a section of the mall that apparently generally shouldn't be accessible to regular people, but he and some other guy are able to get into it and have a meeting where they won't be seen, except by the other guy's girlfriend. This other guy tries to sell Crisp information on Crisp's ex-wife and kid, who fled with a whole bunch of drug money, which is why Crisp is offering a substantial reward for information that will help him find the wife and kid.

Except that Crisp is a nasty man who has no intention of paying out. When the informant tries to press Crisp for the money, Crisp responds by shooting him dead, which obviously gets Kimble's attention. Crisp is arrested, but it's going to be tough to put him behind bars, as the informant's girlfriend isn't much of a witness, being a drug addict; also, Crisp was able to dispose of the murder weapon.

However, Kimble is able to get the same information that the informant gave, which is that the possible sighting of the ex-wife occurred up in Astoria, OR. So the authorities send both Kimble and another detective, Phoebe (Pamela Reed) up to Oregon to try to find the ex-Mrs. Crisp before he can find her, and hopefully get her to testify against him. Since the Crisps' son is kindergarten age, the plan is to have Phoebe pose as a kindergarten teacher in order to do some surreptitious intelligence work with the trusting kids.

Things don't quite work that way, though. On the way up to Oregon, Phoebe gets a pretty severe case of food poisoning, forcing the two of them to switch roles, with Phoebe doing legwork like checking into bank records, and Kimble being the teacher. Not that the principal, Miss Schlowski (Linda Hunt), believes Kimble can possibly make a good teacher.

And here we head into fish out of water comedy territory. Kimble, unsurprisingly, has no prior experience teaching, and doesn't know how to deal with the unruly children at first, children who will mercilessly take advantage of him if he lets them. But Kimble is able to use his physical presence, along with deciding he's going to play at being a sheriff in the classroom, with the children being mock deputies, with the proviso that they have to have the discipline that deputies would have. Surprisingly, it works more or less, at least enough to impress Schlowski, who has only been told there's some sort of investigation going on.

Kimble has a couple of possible candidates for which kid might be Crisp, but isn't certain at first. He's also able to make himself a respected member of the community, and even get a possible romantic interest in another of the teachers, Joyce (Penelope Ann Miller), who is the single mother of Dominic, one of the kids in Kimble's class. It's fairly obvious where this is going. It's also obvious that Crisp, aided by his mother (Carroll Baker), is going to make his way up to Astoria for the climax.

Kindergarten Cop is a moderately entertaining movie, although one that isn't breaking any new ground. Arnold Schwarzenegger is fairly limited in his range as an actor, and the script plays to his strengths in the form of his physical presence and an ability to be that fish out of water. Most of the kids in the kindergarten are written to be ridiculously obnoxious, but the twins playing Dominic are surprisingly not obnoxious. In fact, the children's use of language may make the movie a bit off-putting for some paretns. The adult supporting cast does reasonably well.

Kindergarten Cop is by no means the greatest movie made, and not even anything notably special, but it's worth a watch when it shows up on one or another of the cable channels if you haven't seen it before. (I believe its next airing here in the US is on March 1 on one of the StarzEncore channels.)