Cop Killer

The funniest thing about Cop This is that it exists at all. A star-studded comedy telemovie made on the smell of an oily rag? You could make a petty strong case that all we really needed to get full value was a promo or two and a cast list.

While it’s technically a movie, its more like a move-length collection of scenes. Yes, there is an overall story, and there are a couple of surprises that build on what’s come before. But if you were going to turn this into a traditional movie, you’d end up cutting out at least half of it. The cameos and random scenes are as important as the plot – ok, they’re more important. You’re not going to remember what happened to Gary Sweet’s character, but you are going to remember Glen Robbins’ random one-off scene promoting a gambling app.

So the story is both superfluous and overly complicated. Do we really care about how a drug deal gone bad affects a power struggle within the top ranks of the police force? No: we want to see Mick Molloy doing a random scene as a police dispatcher clearly filmed at some point when he had a spare ten minutes and nobody else was around.

Ed Kavalee wrote, produced, co-directed and appears in this. While there’s too many top-notch comedians here for this to be any kind of auteur project, you can clearly see his hand in the broad strokes. Commercial radio, podcasting, sports gambling (and the commercial side of sport in general), pretentious actors, jokes about racist jokes gone wrong, Matchbox 20 – there are a lot of familiar comedy targets here.

Kavalee’s comedy always feels like the result of hard work rather than of inspiration. The closest he ever gets to anything personal or revealing is a line like “It’s as useless as an Ed Kavalee protein power”. Which is just a joke about his public persona. That works to his advantage here. Anything personal or meaningful would just be a waste of our time. The script could have done with a polish, but only to tighten up a few of the scenes.

Being a ramshackle mess is a strength rather than a weakness here. It’s so shoddy there’s no way you can take it seriously, which is what you want in a comedy. If you think it looks thrown together on the cheap, you’re right. If you think that automatically makes it a bad comedy, you’re a chump.

And it’s not even all that ramshackle. The performances are all over the place, but the broad comedy characters mostly interact with other comedy characters. Meanwhile, the few comedians giving a more serious performance (Rob Carlton, Lehmo, Tony Martin kind of) mostly interact with each other or get scenes where they dominate proceedings.

Then there’s this:

Which, coupled with the news that he’s parted company with his management of 30 years*, suggests that Hughesy may want to take a moment to reflect on his current position.

The big takeaway from all this is that a lot of recent Australian sitcoms would have been a lot funnier if they’d been edited down to a 90 minute telemovie. No ongoing plots, no character development. Just gags and plenty of them in a format that directs your attention to the only thing that matters: the comedy. Cop This isn’t the future of comedy – it’s barely the present – but in 2026 it is a breath of fresh air.

Or at least, it has Toby Truslove saying the immortal line “I played Hamlet once. In a Dan Murphy’s commercial”.

*

*to quote from that piece:

Hughesy has been part of Kevin Whyte’s powerful Token management stable for a couple of decades, but recently the parties agreed to part ways.

Hughes is no longer on the Token website. Clicking through to his former profile page, you find a note reading: “Whoops, it looks like the page you are looking for no longer exists or has been moved.”

Hughes confirmed to CBD he was going in a new direction under his own steam, saying he had been heading towards being independent for a while, long before finding his political voice.

Hughesy’s Political Voice – coming soon to Seven