Narc
is sloppy seconds to last year’s
Training Day. Comparing one movie to another seems
unfair, especially since Training Day won the Academy
Award for best leading actor (Denzel Washington), but that’s all
that has gone through my head since viewing Narc. This is
another good cop, bad cop story, but for a change the cops
aren’t all bad; they have some redeeming aspects to them. Did I
say for a change? Nevermind, I’ve seen this type of twist
before and will undoubtedly see it again.
Nick
Tellis (Jason Patric) is a narcotics officer and in a snap
decision he chooses to kill a druggie to save a child. In the
process a stray bullet hits a pregnant woman who survives, but
loses her unborn baby. As you can imagine, this tortures Tellis.
He is told that the ensuing charges that have been brought
against him will be erased and he can have his choice of
assignment if he helps to solve the killing of a street cop.
Henry Oak
(Ray Liotta), the murdered cop’s partner, will stop at nothing
to catch the murderer, but so far he has only encountered dead
ends. Since Tellis has connections with Detroit’s underground
world of drugs, the police chief teams up the two cops to solve
the murder. The hope is that answers will suddenly and almost
magically present themselves. Tellis has to adjust to Oak’s
brutal police force tactics, while dealing with his life at home
that is slowly falling apart. Oak lost his wife and has
experienced some pretty gruesome cases that have had a lasting
impact on him. The two seem more than willing to solve the case
and therefore work pretty well together, but something smells
funny about the circumstances surrounding the case.
Both
actors do a nice job with their respective roles, but don’t play
well off of each other. The audience is never sure what to think
of their professional relationship. Liotta seems to really
enjoy playing a character with many different aspects to his
personality. Patric plays Tellis as a soft-spoken, intelligent,
yet "stick to your guns" cop and it pays off nicely.
Unfortunately, this just isn’t enough in a movie where the plot
is as stale as bread that has been forgotten in the back of the
refrigerator.
"Imagination"
is what was needed here. The plot is bogged down for the
duration of the movie. It's as if Writer-Director Joe Carnahan
had a great idea for an ending that involves a major plot twist
and then wrote the screenplay backwards without ever reading it
from the beginning to end to see if the plot twist was still
really all that effective. I feel that the movie as a whole
would have been better if Liotta's character had been done away
with, foregoing the immediate cookie cutter feeling of the good
cop, bad cop routine.
On a good
note, however, the cinematography is impressive. Blue hues
contrast sharply with the whites to really give a feeling of
winter and tension. The chase scenes are fantastic. I really
felt as though I was personally chasing the bad guys. These
items are too few and far between to make up for a movie that
left me wondering how it is possible to misuse so much talent in
one film.
