Righteous Kill

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

Righteous Kill (Jon Avnet, 2008) Someone is killing "Scott Free's"—those scum-bags that you just know are guilty but have some smooth-talking fancy-pants lawyer or some milque-toast judge who lets 'em walk, sneering, to prey on Society again...until they show up with a bullet-hole in the middle of their forehead. Two buddy cops, Turk (Robert De Niro) and Rooster (Al Pacino) start to add things up when one of the perps they arrested shows up deader than a Keanu Reeves performance. Looks like it's murder "and somebody's responsible." A vigilante? Certainly. But, if its revenge they're after, why are so many of these guys showing up dead? It's then that they think that the killer may be a cop.

But who?

Complicating matters is that most of the cops, including De Niro, Pacino, plus Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, plus Donnie Wahlberg-o are creeps, so it could be any of 'em, except for the Captain of the squad (Brian Dennehy) but only because you couldn't believe Dennehy could sneak up on anybody but a bed-ridden quadriplegic.

So the question is: which of the crazy actors is playing the crazy character killing all these people?

The answer: who cares? With a movie this terrible, and victims painted so sneeringly evil they're cartoons it's hard to work up much sympathy or even interest in finding their killer. That's the problem of the writer. But director Avnet is so ham-fisted, he can't seem to hold a shot or light a set without sabotaging the drama of a scene. He's so busy "nuancing" things that you have trouble following the plot. He's not even talented enough to get out of the way of De Niro and Pacino (or, God forbid, rein them in) to make a scene play.

And, let's face it, having those two legends on the screen should be a treat: they didn't work together in The Godfather: Part II (obviously), but their scenes in Michael Mann's Heat were tantalizingly short. Here, they're in almost every scene together (although Avnet can't seem to find the wherewithal to keep them in the same shot), and you realize they're like oil and water, or Mumbles and Loudmouth—they're two actors who've known each other for years, but their characters don't seem to. Or else the movie would be over in five minutes. But no, the suspicions and subsequent doubts must be fully explored, the red herrings must stink up the joint, and the script-writer must throw in a couple of feints that make no sense once the movie is over—they're there just to con the audience.*

What a waste. The big mystery is given this script, how could it attract two of the most iconic, respected and (when paired) legendary actors? Sounds like the biggest con was going on behind the scenes. Righteous Kill is the last thing you would expect a film starring De Niro and Pacino would be—a very pedestrian run-of-the-mill movie.

2024 Update: The story goes that at the premiere of this film, De Niro approached Pacino and said that they should never do another movie like this again, that they should find properties they could be proud of appearing in together.

 

As a result, the two actors didn't appear in another film until Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (I Hear You Paint Houses).

* Now, movies are by nature, the manipulation of reality—and the audience—to tell a story.  But, there's doing it well, and there's doing it the Righteous Kill way. 

End of Watch

Written at the time of the film's release...long before the Derek Chauvin conviction, but long after the Rodney King footage. Police work is a tough job that I'd be quite incapable of. And it's made tougher by the fact that they've become the "catch-all" solution to all of Society's problems. There's got to be a better way...for them and for us. I stand by the police. But, I don't stand by, blindly, ignoring the fact that they've become a symptom of a system doing as little as possible...and leaving it for someone else to fix.

Cops, the Home Movie
or
"...More Capers in One Deployment Than Most Cops Will See Their Entire Career."

It's a war out there "once upon a time in South Central." And Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the front-line reporter documenting the whole thing "for a project."  He's carrying a camera—not that he really needs it, the dashboard cam will pick up everything needed for an investigation. But that camera can only look forward—it's myopic. It can't see around you, it can't check the perimeter. And it can't look into your soul. It can look at your back, but it can't have it.

It starts with one of those dash-cam chases, so familiar to "reality" chase shows. No overlayed sound, save for Gyllenhall's narration, said in a monotone as if he was giving you your Miranda.  

I am the police and I am here to arrest you. You have broken the law. I did not write the law. I may even disagree with the law. But I will enforce it. No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy, nothing you do will stop me from putting you in a steel cage with gray bars. If you run away, I will chase you. If you fight me, I will fight back. If you shoot at me, I will shoot back. By law I am unable to walk away. I am a consequence. I am the unpaid bill. I am fate with a badge and a gun. Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love, and yes, I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who would die for me and I for them. We stand watch together. The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.*

And with that, the law of the film is laid down. The dash-cam goes away and the camera goes into cinema verité, the camera pointing from inside Taylor's locker as he goes through basic introductions—himself, his partner Mike Zavalla (Michael Peña, never better), his equipment (and a conversation from Rio Bravo pops into one's head: "That all you got?" "That's what I got."), and the beginning of the look inside—the harsh joshing, the tensions, the coolness and coldness and camaraderie of the corps. Joseph Wambaugh had an apt phrase for them in his book (and subsequent film), "The New Centurions." But Rome was never like this.

The turf in South Central is tough and hard-scrabble. Poverty is on display on every street corner, and behind the boarded-up windows of the houses in various states of disrepute are secrets for the outside world not to know, but will see the light of day once the front door is kicked in. The war is in the streets, but inside cook the warning signs that something is about to explode, the stakes rising, the limits of human degradation dropping, the calibers of the weapons increasing, the risks increasing and the only good side of it being that they're not increasing exponentially.

It's a tough film, directed and written by the guy who wrote Training Day and the original The Fast and the Furious, David Ayer, who has a knack for keeping things on the down-trodden path no matter who's behind the camera or what the subject matter is. It's not a film for continuity buffs, who will be driven crazy if they think "Okay, who's taking that shot?" with every change of perspective. Very quickly, the strictures of the snatch-and-grabbed shot are forgotten to gain perspective. The film would have been a pretentious (and claustrophobic) confusion if the conceit was maintained throughout, (I can see the review headline now: "The Blair Watch Project"), but as it is, breathes enough air into it while maintaining a feeling of impromptu recording—keeping the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of it. That, along with the ad-libbed spark of the dialogue gives it an edgy immediacy that, again, "seems" right, while never fully escaping the feeling of planned manipulation (not that it ever could). Game try, though. And manages to show the life—long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of terror—that one imagines the life to be, even though blown up with steroids to fulfill the needs for melodrama and tension.

* But, what it doesn't say is "We are also responsible, culpable, and...accountable."

Walking Kurosawa's Road: Stray Dog

The inability to write about the films of Akira Kurosawa to my satisfaction led me to to take a different path: start at the beginning, take each film in sequence, one after the other, and watch the progression of the man from film-maker to Master. I'm hoping I can write more intelligently and more knowledgeably about his work by, step by step, Walking Kurosawa's Road.

Stray Dog (aka "Nora inu," aka 野良犬, Akira Kurosawa, 1949) Detective Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) has just started with the Homicide division when, after some target practice he loses his service pistol, a Colt, fully loaded, when he's pick-pocketed on a trolley. Maybe he should have had a holster for it, rather than kept it in his jacket pocket. But, it's hot and he was up all night on a stake-out, and he's a rookie.

Plus, it's tough to be at your best in all the heat, which is blasting the city. That probably had something to do with why he couldn't catch the thief when he noticed the pistol was gone, moments after it was lifted. He reports the weapon stolen, and, shamed, he starts his own investigation, going undercover for days to try and track it down—a bravura eight-minute sequence done without dialog. While he goes about the underbelly of Tokyo in his quest, the urgency for results starts to weigh on him even more. The division's forensics department matches a bullet from his gun with an armed robbery, his first break in the case but he takes no joy in it. The loss is still Murakami's responsibility and he worries that his gun will be used in worse crimes.

Murakami's undercover work pays off when he's able to follow a line to a dance-hall floozy who's a black marketer who trades guns for ration cards. He takes her in for questioning, but he makes a lot of what one would call "rookie mistakes" in his anxiousness to get a line on his gun. His superiors suggest he paired up with a more seasoned detective, Satō (Takashi Shimura), who does his own questioning of the girl—she's a bit vague on details like names and such, but she gives just enough information that the two detectives are able to track her supplier to a baseball stadium, where he's arrested and a name obtained from a ration card.

They've got a name—Yusa—but, not the man. They're able to find out that he's a war veteran who's returned to civilian life, but couldn't make a go of it and has turned to petty theft. For Murakami, this motivation only reflects that the two men have similar backgrounds, and, were it not for his own better angels, he might have ended up just as Yusa. Interviews and research get them closer to him, but he still remains illusive. The culprit's sister has lost track of him. But, she mentions a girl-friend and Satō and Murakami go to the night-club where she, Harumi Namaki (Keiko Awaji), dances. 

She wants nothing to do with the coppers, and she's evasive in her answers, even when Satō presses her with what he knows about them. The thief comes to see her dance every day—there has to be something between them. Satō isn't afraid to call her a liar and presses the question. The girl breaks down in hysterics. It's hot, everyone's tired, and the two decide to interview her again the next day, away from her work. 

Mifune does a distinctive John-Ford-Western stance before the clouds break.

But, the gun has been used again—this time in a house robbery resulting in murder. For Murakami, time is now of the essence and he'll do anything to get the gun back. There are only a few bullets left, and any of them can take a life. How much worse will it get before he can find his gun and the man wielding it? His worst fears will be realized, but first, he and Satō have to interview the girlfriend again. They choose a different approach.

The two detectives decide to confront Harumi at her mother's house. The mother already thinks Harumi is a spoiled child and turns on the guilts to try to get her daughter to spill what she knows to the detectives. Once the mother knows who they're looking for, she lets them know that Yusa has just left, leaving a box of matches. Satō, figuring that the mother will harangue the information out of her daughter eventually, takes the matches to follow up at the hotel they advertise, leaving Murakami with the two women. A thunderstorm starts to rumble outside ominously; the heat will break soon. Nature can only take so much pressure.

Under the accusations by her mother and Murakami, the girl starts to downplay the importance of the man, saying he's just a hanger-on at the club, love-sick, and that he's not important to her—except that he bought her a dress, one that she couldn't possibly afford herself. And why shouldn't she have something like that? It's a rotten world and she'll take all the gifts she can get out of it. "Yes, it's a rotten world," Murakami berates her. "But, it's worse to take it out on the world. If you feel that way about it, why don't you steal!" He notices that all she can do is look at the dress, reluctant to even touch it, so he goads her into putting it on. While, thunder cracks and the skies light up with lightning, she twirls in the dress in ecstasy ("It's wonderful...like a dream") until her mother can't take anymore and tears the dress off her. The girl, shamed, finally breaks down, while outside, the rains start to beat down. 

Personal responsibilities and consequences. Stray Dog is full of them. Murakami's protagonist puts himself through hell, counting (and sweating) bullets while the rest of the world blithely looks away or makes excuses. One would think he was too close to the situation, too emotionally invested, to be the lead investigator—and partnering him with Satō takes the edge off—but, his sense of guilt can only be dealt with if he can find the guilt party, and so he won't be dissuaded. If Mifune's performance doesn't persuade you of his troubled psyche, Kurosawa surrounds him with oppressive weather to put on the heat and scorch the earth to highlight the emotions. During the girl's breakdown it gets to be a shade too emblematic, but the release is effective, and one is grateful for the reprieve of the investigation's tension.

Kurosawa only liked it in retrospective, saying "all that technique and not one real thought in it." He'd been trying to make a movie in the style of the Maigret novels he loved as a child, with the gritty realism of film-noir and neo-realism emerging throughout world cinema, but could not reach his own high expectations. Still, if this is a failure, it's a damned good one, working on levels both obvious and subliminal. He changed his mind about the film, eventually, and I think it may have been a case of the director seeing all his own strings in play, and finding it all pretty obvious. It is the first Japanese police drama, and so he was plowing virgin fields here. 

But it's a brilliant film, and for a police procedural, it's pretty much the user's manual.

The "stray dog" is run to ground, captured, and lets out an animal howl. 

There are a lot of interesting things in this scene—the monster-like stances, the brief cut-away to an indifferent outside-world, the contrast of the brutal chase in the bucolic world.

Kurosawa's confrontation scene has influenced many a hard-boiled author and artist.

Olde Review: French Connection II

This was written November 5, 1975 at the time of the film's release. As with the ASUW Film series "Olde Reviews," I've left it alone (despite the temptation to "fix" things), giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the 1970's a break. More current thoughts are in the customary light gray.  

French Connection II (John Frankenheimer, 1975) Fortunately, Friedkin's original The French Connection was on television last week, so that I was able to refresh my memory somewhat, as to what was there. As FCII is a sequel, it begs to be compared with its parent film. There isn't much difference alphabetically between Friedkin and Frankenheimer, but they are night and day on the screen.

Friedkin in FCI punched the viewer with his action and cutting and forced people to crawl over the backs of their chairs because of it.

Frankenheimer ain't no slouch, either, as one can see by his sequence on the Marseilles docks (I wasn't on the edge of my seat, but I was flinching a lot), or "Popeye" Doyle's (Gene Hackman) final chase down of "Frog One" Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey).

But Frankenheimer has a different emphasis in his film. Friedkin's characters are one-dimensional. Even the most fleshed-out character, Doyle, is reduced to quirks: his fetish for boots, his gun holster on his ankle, his "Didja ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" line of questioning. Not so with Frankenheimer. He doesn't dwell on these (why should he, they've been done?), but fleshes them out. "Popeye," a stranger in a strange land, is reduced to having a drink with the only person who will, the bartender. A sympathy develops for him that was never attained in TFC (just as their was a twinge of disappointment when TFC's famous car-chase ended, so I felt a twinge, again, when Hackman's "cold turkey" scene with Bernard Fresson, where a pitiful "Popeye" talks about his Catholic upbringing and sports--just one of those moments that are instantly identifiable as "great.") Friedkin's people were there to be "blown away," an excuse for instant action, but Frankenheimer in most cases drags out the killing, allowing the viewer to get to know who's who before they're gone-gone.

Even the subject matter of the films reflect their directors. The French Connection was a pursuit film. We knew that "Frog One" was dealing in heroin, but heroin was an abstract term--it was bought and sold like candy--and Charnier could be afforded a little grudging admiration for his plot. Not so with Frankenheimer. In French Connection II heroin is no longer just a word. It's effects, its evil, is clearly displayed on the screen in vivid detail. Frankenheimer is a "feeling" director. Even Cathleen Nesbitt's "little old lady" is given sympathy by showing her a sweet, frail little thing, abandoned by her family, and then showing her gnarled hands, decimated arms and thieving habits.

Friedkin was action, with little heroics that weren't bordering on the obsessed. In FCII, even though battling for his life "Popeye" Doyle still has the time to try to save Barthélémy from drowning after being konked by a timber. When actions are obsessive and excessive (as in "Popeye" burning down the Hotel Del C______., as was his elevated train chase). Frankenheimer has the mind to show it as such by using a device common to Huston and Altman--by enveloping his subject in flame. The images that stick in my mind from this film are the ones that evoked a feeling in me from Frankenheimer's "feeling" direction--the ones already mentioned, Barthélémy's look of concern outside a locked door for that irritating foreigner jabbering inside the cell as he goes through withdrawal, the agony of stiffened limbs that is tangible to the viewer as "Popeye" tries to chin up, push-up, sit-up or jog. Oh, it is to be admired and appreciated.

French Connection II is a completely different animal from its Best Picture-winning predecessor, but in its way is a bit truer to the purposes of the original—it has more of a documentary (or should I say "verité") feel (despite the differences in style of the cinematography of Owen Roizman and Claude Renoir). Little moments are not made much of and you're allowed to notice them rather than have them telegraphed. Aiding that feeling is Frankenheimer's scrupulous adherence to french (without subtitles)* You feel like you've been dropped into a real scene and left to fend for yourself—much like Doyle, a couple years from the original film and sent to Marseilles...basically, to be a "sitting duck," to draw out Fernando Rey's Charnier.

What use could a stubbornly New Yorkish cop be to the French police other than that? But Hackman's Doyle is such a "dog-with-a-bone" that he won't let go, even if his best and worst instincts are being ham-strung by French "minders" from the department. Gene Hackman won the Oscar for Best Actor for The French Connection—ironic as he wasn't happy with the part, wasn't happy with the director** and had walked off the set once—but his performance as Doyle in the sequel is one of the best in a career filled with incredible work, showing the character so completely out of his depth, but pushing on with stubborn brio, stammering to be understood (Hackman ad-libbed through a lot of Pete Hamill's dialog work) by indifferent locals and blistering through the sequences where Doyle is nabbed, given a three-week crash-course in heroin addiction by the French mobsters, then dumped on the police doorstep to undergo the agonizing withdrawal symptoms of going cold turkey. It's as if Hackman is paying penance for the earlier Award by displaying such virtuosity. It's jaw-droppingly good work, a one-man show surrounded by a finely tuned film working at cross-purposes to support it.

It is always good to see a follow-up film—this was 1975 and "sequels" were not a part of the movie market-scheme nor were they automatically expected***—which builds on the foundations of the first film, but finds its own path, rather than giving us a reiteration of what has gone before. The French Connection II is a great follow-up, with greater breadth, depth, and ambitions and it ends with a decisive bang.

* Frankenheimer lived many years in France and insisted on French actors and crew, so there would be no compromise on the aesthetic. Non-French-speaking American audiences are as much at a disadvantage as Doyle is and his character's attempts to communicate make for a lot of frustration and humor. Curiously, the French-language version of the film has Doyle speaking French in an American accent, which confuses the issue and ruins the effect.

** Friedkin had made him doing the "Santa Claus" rundown seen at the beginning of The French Connection 27 times and Hackman had notoriously bad knees, as is evident in the chase in French Connection II

*** The Godfather Part II had only come out in December, 1974; French Connection II in May of 1975.

End of Watch

Cops, the Home Movie
or
"...More Capers in One Deployment Than Most Cops Will See Their Entire Career."

It's a war out there "once upon a time in South Central."  And Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the front-line reporter documenting the whole thing "for a project."  He's carrying a camera—not that he really needs it, the dashboard cam will pick up everything needed for an investigation.  But that camera can only look forward—it's myopic.  It can't see around you, it can't check the perimeter.  And it can't look into your soul.  It can look at your back, but it can't have it.

It starts with one of those dash-cam chases, so familiar to "reality" chase shows.  No overlayed sound, save for Gyllenhall's narration, said in a monotone as if he was giving you your Miranda.  

I am the police and I am here to arrest you.  You have broken the law.  I did not write the law.  I may even disagree with the law.  But I will enforce it.  No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy, nothing you do will stop me from putting you in a steel cage with gray bars.  If you run away, I will chase you.  If you fight me, I will fight back.  If you shoot at me, I will shoot back.  By law I am unable to walk away.  I am a consequence.  I am the unpaid bill.  I am fate with a badge and a gun.  Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love, and yes, I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who would die for me and I for them.  We stand watch together.  The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.

And with that, the law of the film is layed down.  The dash-cam goes away and the camera goes into cinema verité, the camera pointing from inside Taylor's locker as he goes through basic introductions—himself, his partner Mike Zavalla (Michael Peña, never better), his equipment (and a conversation from Rio Bravo pops into one's head: "That all you got?"  "That's what I got."), and the beginning of the look inside—the harsh joshing, the tensions, the coolness and coldness and camaraderie of the corps. Joseph Wambaugh had an apt phrase for them in his book (and subsequent film), "The New Centurions."  But Rome was never like this.

The turf in South Central is tough and hard-scrabble.  Poverty is on display on every street corner, and behind the boarded-up windows of the houses in various states of disrepute are secrets for the outside world not to know, but will see the light of day once the front door is kicked in.  The war is in the streets, but inside cook the warning signs that something is about to explode, the stakes rising, the limits of human degradation dropping, the calibers of the weapons increasing, the risks increasing and the only good side of it being that they're not increasing exponentially.

It's a tough film, directed and written by the guy who wrote Training Day and the original The Fast and the Furious, David Ayer, who has a knack for keeping things on the down-trodden path no matter who's behind the camera or what the subject matter is.  It's not a film for continuity buffs, who will be driven crazy if they think "Okay, who's taking that shot?" with every change of perspective.  Very quickly, the strictures of the snatch-and-grabbed shot are forgotten to gain perspective.  The film would have been a pretentious (and claustrophobic) confusion if the conceit was maintained throughout, (I can see the review headline now: "The Blair Watch Project"), but as it is, breathes enough air into it while maintaining a feeling of impromptu recording—keeping the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of it.  That, along with the ad-libbed spark of the dialogue gives it an edgy immediacy that, again, "seems" right, while never fully escaping the feeling of planned manipulation (not that it ever could).  Game try, though.  And manages to show the life—long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of terror—that one imagines the life to be, even though blown up with steroids to fulfill the needs for melodrama and tension.