London Film Fest 2011 Day 5 - RAMPART

When I walked in to RAMPART I was expecting the movie equivalent of The Wire or The Shield - an examination of corruption and institutional racism in the police force, based on the real Rampart scandal in 1990s Los Angeles. To be sure, director Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) and writer James Ellroy impressionistically hint at the wider malaise.  We have cameos from Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver as the ass-covering establishment. But there's no clear picture of the wider context - no attempt to connect the dots and take the viewer to the heart of the corruption, in the  manner of LA CONFIDENTIAL. Rather, this movie is a character study of a fictional policeman at the centre of the scandal - Woody Harrelson's Dave Brown.  

To that end, the centre of the story isn't the police department or the patrol car, but the home Dave shares with the mothers of his two children, who also happen to be sisters (Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon); the bars he frequents; the woman he picks up (Robin Wright).  Because, let us be clear - RAMPART is a scathing depiction of a delusional man, so corrupt he can't even see it, or own it - a self-destructive charmer, who thinks he should be rewarded for "doing the city's dirty work" but can't see that he's destroying his family in the process.  

If you accept the movie as a character study rather than a thriller or procedural, you have a far greater chance of enjoying it. Frustrations with the ambiguities of the graft and the uneven pacing - the lack of real "bite" - are compensated for by the powerful, charismatic and complex central performance by Woody Harrelson and the impressionistic use of intense colour and feeling of claustrophobia created by DP Bobby Bukowksi (ARLINGTON ROAD). Because, in the final analysis, RAMPART is not a great movie - it doesn't hold you in the way that it should - it is, rather, a highly successful mood piece that contains a superlative central performance. I just wish that that performance had been anchored to a stronger supporting text.

RAMPART played Toronto and London 2011.

Michael Stipe and Woody Harrelson at the UK premiere
of RAMPART at the BFI London Film Festival.

STREET KINGS - once a patsy....

STREET KINGS is a dull, predictable, mis-cast, dirty-cop-thriller from the director of HARSH TIMES and writer of TRAINING DAY. The movie features Keanu Reeves as a meat-head, bent-out-of-shape, vigilante cop. Forest Whitaker is the corrupt police chief pulling his strings. The Reeves character has an attack of morality and goes after the gang-land killers of another cop who was actually snitching on him. It's a cute little Catch 22 situation. If he finds the killers, they could implicate him (wrongly, for once) in the hit. Should he take the fall but do the right thing? In a town so corrupt, what's the right thing anyways?

After LA CONFIDENTIAL and TRAINING DAY, I need to see something pretty special from a dirty cop film to justify its existence, and this film just doesn't have it. The script is derivative, paced too slow, and the plot twists will be obvious to anyone familiar with the genre. The casting is an even bigger problem. Keanu Reeves is plain unconvincing as a grizzled, hard-as-nails cop. He's about as hard as my grandmother. Hugh Laurie is similarly unconvincing as a foul-mouthed, intimidating Internal Affairs cop. Forest Whitaker hams it up as the Chief - it's like watching one of those grim Al Pacino performances where he randomly shouts things and pastiches himself. In fact, pretty much the only actors who do a good job are two young, relatively inexperienced cast members - Naomie Harris as a grieving widow and Chris Evans as a rookie cop.

STREET KINGS is on release in the Philippines, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Oman, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next week in Argentina, Denmark, Iceland, Spain and Sweden and the following week in Norway. It opens in May in Belgium, Hong Kong and in June in Australia, France, Italy and Poland.