Film Review: Across 110th Street (1972)

I've written about what I call "cop noir" in a previous post on The Seven-Ups, but it's worth repeating in the context of this film: Cop noir begins with The French Connection (1971). If film noir was all about doomed lovers, laconic private detectives, and moody cinematography, cop noir was about documenting the decline and fall of American cities and the institutions that make them function as seen through cop eyes. Cop noir looks raw, sounds raw, and shows big American cities torn apart by street crime, organized crime, drug addiction, poverty, and corruption. Hard on the heels of The French Connection came Dirty Harry, Across 110th Street, Busting, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham 123, Badge 373, The Seven-Ups and a number of similar films.

 Across 110th Street is one of the highlights of the genre. All cop noir films are aggressive in showing just how rotten their urban environments are, but this film does it with real ferocity. One way it does this is by showing the racial fear and hatred that was one of the causes of the decline of American cities in the 1970s. The film begins with three black robbers knocking over a cash counting house run by the Mafia and a black Harlem gangster. They make off with 300k after killing five mobsters and two cops, and within hours the Mafia and the Harlem hoods have joined forces to track down the culprits. They join forces despite the fact that they can't stand each other. Nick, the Mafia lieutenant given the task of finding the thieves, gleefully uses the N-word every chance he gets, and Doc, the Harlem boss, happily responds in kind. The detectives in charge of the case (played by Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn) are almost equally at odds because of race. All in all, this had to be an exceedingly uncomfortable film for both black and white audiences to sit through.

Across also gets marks for being non-judgmental about its villains. The three thieves are shown to be acting out of desperation and fear, and the leader of the gang, Jim, gets a compelling speech in which he describes just what's led him to taking such an enormous risk. Paul Benjamin plays Jim, and it's a wonder his performance didn't lead to bigger and better roles. Not surprisingly, it was Sidney Lumet, a director with an amazing ability to spot new talent, who gave him one of his first roles in The Anderson Tapes (1971). All the cast performs well, and even Anthony Quinn manages to tone down his hamminess a wee bit. The look of the film is another of its strengths; it's almost entirely shot with handheld cameras, and the slums and cop shops most of the action takes place in are so gritty you may need to wipe down your TV screen after viewing. The documentary look in cop noir was pioneered in The French Connection, but Across takes it to the next level.

Cop noir took a dystopian view of American society, and it's a perspective that didn't last out the decade. Through the '80s and '90s cops became one-dimensional superheroes played by Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy. These cops were wisecracking killers, and their enemies were cartoon villains or demonized proles interfering with the safe running of the American Dream. The cops in cop noir movies are sometimes corrupt, and when they solve a case it usually produces a lot of collateral damage, both physical and emotional. This harsh view of American life reflected the reality of the nation's cities, but, as it turned out, the public had a limited appetite for it. In the last decade TV shows like The Wire have partially resurrected cop noir, so here's hoping we get a film revival of the genre sometime soon. Are you listening, Quentin Tarantino?

Film Review: Dredd 3D (2012)

Karl Urban stars as The Great Gazoo Judge Dredd

If you've seen Robocop and The Raid you've seen Dredd 3D. The setting is a dystopian future with a "megacity" that's decrepit, overpopulated, and overrun with ruthless criminals. Judges are heavily armed, suited like a combination medieval knight and NFL player, and authorized to act as judge, jury and executioner. The plot has Dredd, the best of the judges, partnered with a female rookie named Anderson who has psychic powers. They answer a call about a killing in Peachtrees Tower, a 200-storey apartment block controlled by a drug lord named Ma Ma. Dredd and Anderson become trapped in the tower and have to shoot it out with Ma Ma's numerous minions.

Dredd is what results when the Hollywood imagination factory goes on strike. It's actually jaw-dropping how derivative and generic this film is. Judge Dredd is Robocop with less wit, and the story is virtually a carbon copy of The Raid. The action? There's a lot of creeping around concrete corridors and jumping out to kill baddies. The baddies, as is usual in the lamer action films, make things easy by obligingly standing out in the open and otherwise making themselves easy targets. The only thing that distinguishes Dredd from its peers is its bloodiness. The screen is awash in fake blood, not to mention flying bits of bone and flesh. The only other wrinkle in the film is Anderson's ability to read minds. This comes in handy from time to time, but it's an add-on that doesn't bring very much to the party.

The actors are as generic as the plot. Karl Urban as Dredd only gets to act with his chin thanks to a Great Gazoo helmet that almost completely obscures his face, and Olivia Thirlby as Anderson appears to have been kept tranquilized throughout the shooting of the film. And how about poor Wood Harris? He played drug kingpin Avon Barksdale in The Wire, and now he gets to play a subordinate to a drug kingpin. Never let it be said that roles are limited for black actors in Hollywood: they get to play a wide variety of roles within the illegal narcotics industry. Speaking of kingpins, Ma Ma is a terrible villainess. She looks and acts like a tired Denny's waitress who's stuck working the all-night shift. Scooby Doo has faced more convincing villains than Ma Ma.

If you have to watch this one at least wait until it's out on DVD; that way you wont have to sit through another example of why 3D sucks.

TV Review: Braquo (2009)

The French can make thrillers like nobody's business, but cop shows/movies are something they just don't get the hang of. The main reason is that their versions always feel like self-conscious recreations of US cop shows. Braquo is an excellent example of this. Like The Wire, it's a mini-series with a single story arc that carries us from episode one to eight. Four Paris police detectives, Eddy, Theo, Walter and Roxanne, lose their leader, Max, when he decides to violently assault a murder suspect. Internal Affairs goes after Max who then kills himself. Our team then kidnaps the murder suspect from hospital (Max stabbed him in the eye with a pen) in order to interrogate him about his partner in the killing. Oops! They accidentally shoot him through the head. And from that point on the team is trying to cover up the killing and keep one step ahead of Internal Affairs. But for every step forward in covering up their tracks they take two backwards, all of which involve more killings, beatings, and all manner of things well-behaved cops aren't supposed to do.

It's pretty clear the creator of the show, Olivier Marchal, is taking his cue from The Wire and the grittier cop films from the 1970s ( my piece on '70s "cop noir" is here). Marchal also tries very, very hard to outdo his US heroes in toughness and grittiness. And that's where Braquo gets a bit daffy and unintentionally amusing. His four cops, just to show how tough and noir they are, never, ever smile. I mean it. In eight episodes I might have seen one unironic smile between the four of them. And to further underline their gravitas, they continually look defeated, sour, disheveled and short on sleep. Poor Roxanne looks like she's taken a vow of abstinence from shampoo and combs. If one them had a lighthearted moment they might die from the bends. They also smoke like chimneys and knock back booze constantly. Like a lot of other fictional TV and movie cops these four get to live in some fabulous digs. Eddy, the leader of the group, lives on a river barge; Theo has an ultra-modern apartment; Roxanne shares a big. luxurious townhouse with her older boyfriend; and Walter, the family man, lives in an old house in Paris that is covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. You get the picture.What might be most amusing about this show is that the cops make one bad decision after another, each one getting them into deeper and murkier water. At more than a few points in the series I was yelling at the screen, "You morons! That's your idea of a plan?" But I was doing it in an amused sort of way.

It sounds like I'm slagging Braquo, but I'm not, really. Even with all its attempts to one-up Yankee cop shows, like some little kid trying to impress his big brother, Braquo is still quite entertaining. The acting is very good, it looks great, there's violence aplenty, and the bizarro plot keeps you hooked because it's hard to believe how things are going to get worse for the cops. But they do. I've only seen season one and it ends with a rather monstrous cliffhanger, and it looks like the succeeding season will consist of the team, as per usual, not doing a jot of actual police work, but, instead, there will be a lot of drinking, smoking, bad hair days, torturing of suspects, and assassinations of crims. I just hope Roxanne gets a chance to take a shower. By the way, "braquo" is supposedly Parisian criminal slang for a big heist. I think it's more likely to be Parisian cop slang for "D'oh!"