CHiPs (2017)

Dax Shepard's 2017 adaptation of the CHiPs television series arrives as a buddy-cop comedy with the throttle open and the brain disengaged, a film that treats its source material as a safety net for a motor sports passion project. Two California Highway Patrol officers, one an undercover FBI agent, one a washed-up motocross rider with poor aptitude scores, stumble into a ring of corrupt cops running armored-car heists. The tone is raunchy, the plotting is generic, and the whole enterprise carries itself with the breezy confidence of a man who has decided that motorcycles and banter are sufficient. Critics disagreed. The Razzie committee handed it a special award, which is its own kind of distinction.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film registers faint pulses and little else. Michael Peña anchors as co-lead, and Rosa Salazar and Adam Rodriguez fill out the ensemble, so the cast is diverse in the ordinary way that casting is diverse when nobody is making a point of it. A subplot concerns a closeted highway patrol officer whose boyfriend is coerced into suicide by the villain, a same-sex thread that is concrete but grim and entirely in service of the corruption plot. Female officers appear throughout, though the press notes described one as tough and beautiful, which tells you where the characterization budget went. Nothing here is framed through race, class, or environment. The corruption is a plot device, not an indictment of anything larger.

The film lectures no one. It has no thesis about bodies, brains, history, or the climate. It simply wants to be a Bad Boys on motorcycles and mostly fails at that. For the archivist of progressive sensibilities, this is a thin specimen: a few unremarked casting choices, one tragic gay subplot, and a handful of women standing near the action. The rest is exhaust fumes and dick jokes, offered without apology and without argument.