Barry Cooper Finds Redemption: Never Get Busted! Film Review
Film still from Never Get Busted!
Never Get Busted! is the kind of documentary you don’t quite believe exists until you’re watching it unfold in front of you. The film revolves around a stranger-than-fiction portrait of Barry Cooper, the former Texas narcotics officer who once prided himself on being the state’s “top drug cop,” until he turned against them. What emerges is a story as messy, riveting, and morally tangled as the man at its centre directed by David Ngo.
The film traces Cooper’s evolution from zealous lawman to renegade whistle-blower, a pivot that feels both heroic and deeply complicated. When Cooper confesses how ruthlessly he pursued arrests, it lands with the full force of someone who once believed in the righteousness of the badge. But as he begins exposing crooked cops, staging sting operations, and helping everyday people evade oppressive policing, his narrative shifts from repentance to something more elusive: a man chasing redemption while never fully relinquishing his taste for power.
That’s the film when it’s at its most compelling. Cooper isn’t simply a fallen cop searching for forgiveness; he’s someone who has always gravitated toward leadership, adoration, and control. In the police force, he wielded power through fear. In his church community, he occupied a position of spiritual influence. And now, as a public figure on the internet, he seeks a different form of stature through activism and being a part self-mythologizing showman. Whether this is genuine moral awakening or carefully repackaged ego is a question the film wisely never tries to answer outright.
The editing is relentless in a way that holds your attention with a rapid-fire blend of interview footage, YouTube-era confessionals, and startling archival cop-cam clips that pull you into the emotional whiplash of Cooper’s life. The archival material is especially potent because it isn’t just one man’s eccentric journey, but a window into how deeply broken American policing practices are. At times, A Place Beyond the Pines came to mind, but this is real life and its stripped of cinematic gloss because corruption is not just for the blockbuster movies — it is pulled from real experiences.
What keeps Never Get Busted! gripping is its willingness to hold contradictions without smoothing them out. Cooper is both culpable and compassionate; opportunistic yet sincere; a man running from his past while performing his redemption publicly, insistently. You can’t quite trust him, but you can’t look away either. That’s precisely why his story works on screen because it forces you to consider how personal transformation happens in the shadow of institutional violence and whether someone who once caused harm can meaningfully redirect their gifts, even their charisma, toward dismantling the system they upheld.
The film doesn’t excuse Cooper’s past and doesn’t fully celebrate his present. Instead, it gives us something rarer: the portrait of a man who is trying, imperfectly and theatrically, to weaponize his former “evil” for good. Never Get Busted! captures that complexity with candour, speed, and a surprising amount of heart. It’s a redemption story that refuses to let you relax into moral certainty — and that’s exactly what makes it worth watching. Also: ACAB.