Back in 2002, when I was working at the video store, there was nothing appealing to me about watching this movie: I mean come on, it was Jason Patric of Speed 2: Cruise Control and a fat Ray Liotta in another good-cop-bad-cop drama that a large part of the I-only-like-bad-popular-movies contingent really liked. I mean, it had "shitty" written all over it. Unfortunately for me, that was back in the day when I worked at the Roseville FV where there was basically only one person who ever liked the same kinds of movies as me (I mean, my manager loved Corky Romano for fuck's sake) so there was no one with whom to talk about what I should rent. As a matter of fact, if any of my co-workers has mentioned that they had like the movie, I would have actually avoided it.
In the intervening years, I'd all but forgotten about this movie until it came up while Dan and Marianne and I were taking a Sporcle quiz (true story!) and he mentioned that he had actually liked it. So I gave it a whirl today. What I got was a tense, measured drama between a pretty good cop (Patric) and a bit of a loose cannon cop (Liotta) who are teamed up-ish to solve the case of a murdered undercover cop. The movie is a well-measured, decently-acted (if a bit over-the-top, at times) drama, with some "twists" that, thankfully, don't leave the viewer scratching his head and trying to put together pieces from six different puzzles to make it plausible (I'm looking at you, Shyamalan).
The last fifteen minutes are the key to this movie, and they do a really nice job of summing up the rest of the movie (very dramatically, of course) and it is in this fifteen minutes that the movie truly hinges: if it sucks, then the movie sucks, but if you can pull off the trails leading this way and that, and make the conclusion at least satisfactory, then at least you've accomplished the major goal.
Score: 8.5/10
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