Father and child sit together smiling while looking at a smart phone.

Want more recommendations for your family?

Sign up for our weekly newsletter for entertainment inspiration

Parents' Guide to

Cop and a Half: New Recruit

By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 7+

Kid helps cop in tame but awful family comedy.

Movie PG 2017 97 minutes
Cop and a Half: New Recruit Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

See all
age 6+

Based on 5 parent reviews

ChristaB716
ChristaB716 Parent of 7 and 11-year-old
July 4, 2020
age 6+

Great family movie! We loved it.

It’s hard to find kids movies that don’t have a bunch of sexy stuff, product placement, and generally bad lead characters to be role models. There’s no adult language or sexualization in this one. The storyline is cute with a little bit of cheesy action. There’s reference to the girl’s dad dying when she was young, and there’s a pretty tame bully who gets called out in the beginning. The girl’s phone looks like an iPhone, and she mentions FaceTime once, but that’s the closest thing to product placement, and most kids movies these days are riddled with advertising.

This title has:

Great messages
Great role models
Niweera
Niweera Adult
February 20, 2018
age 6+

The rookies are getting younger and younger all the time...

Good family drama shows a cop and a young girl, who catches a notorious culprit in a funny manner. Gives a good message that if you work together regardless of other differences, you could actually win...
See all 5 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Karina (Lulu Wilson) is an outgoing 12-year-old, the recruit in COP AND A HALF: NEW RECRUIT. She brazenly speaks to adults as if they were less than her peers and seems to live an independent life. Her lovely but out-of-the-loop mother (Gina Holden), a widowed and seemingly busy nurse, is unaware of Karina's outside interests. She doesn't know that Karina has foisted herself on Detective Simmons (Lou Diamond Phillips), a downtrodden cop who harbors guilt for letting a particular criminal get away years before. A tech-savvy prankster is embarrassing the cops repeatedly, using technology to cause such inconveniences as exploding toilets, and generally disrupting the town. The police find no clues, save little poems the perp leaves after every dirty trick that are designed to make the humiliation complete. A tech whiz herself, Karina helps Simmons discover the drones used to commit the vandalism, making herself indispensable to the investigation.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (5 ):
Kids say (6 ):

It's always nice to see the likable Lou Diamond Phillips on screen, but he's the most watchable part of this otherwise low-quality movie. Cop and a Half: New Recruit is mostly cringe-inducing. Lulu Wilson as Karina seems like an exceptionally bright and charming girl, but also someone with much to learn about subtlety in performance. The script doesn't make much sense. The police force is treating a mere nuisance as if it were the crime of the century. Why? Most puzzling is the fact that at the movie's supposed moment of greatest danger, when the criminal grabs hold of Karina and threatens to harm her, you have to wonder what he might do to her -- twist her arm really hard? He has no knife at her throat, no gun to her head. Yet Detective Simmons pulls his gun on the guy and keeps his distance, as if the perp might shoot or stab Karina. In that situation, the only one truly under threat is the unarmed perp with the gun aimed at him.

This is just another movie about a smart kid that isn't itself smart enough to be interesting.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about how kids sometimes want to grow up to be like their parents. Karina's deceased father had been a cop and she has inherited his enthusiasm for finding criminals and bringing them to justice. What do you think inspires kids to want to go into a particular profession? What do you want to do, and why?

  • Did Cop and a Half: New Recruit make you laugh? What are your favorite comedies?

  • Does it seem realistic that a police captain eventually welcomes Karina's assistance? Why might it be problematic to have a kid helping out on a case?

Movie Details

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

See all recommended movie lists

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

See how we rate