Narc, dir Joe Carnahan, 2002, Dark Blue, dir Ron Shelton, 2002, and Homicide: Life on the Street Seasons 1 and 2

In the 1970s, it was still possible to attract big audiences to crime movies whose heroes walked the razor's edge between right and wrong through morally complex stories with ambiguous endings. It was possible for Frances Ford Coppola to make The Godfather, a dark inversion of the American Dream in which a war hero becomes a mob boss. It was possible for Martin Scorsese to make Taxi Driver, in which a would-be assassin blows his frustration in an episode of crazed vigilantism that turns him into a hero. And it was possible for William Friedkin to make The French Connection, in which a brutal detective and his partner use any means necessary to pursue the mastermind behind a huge drug deal. While it's still possible to make this kind of movie, most, as Friedkin points out in a generous thought piece included in the DVD of writer/director Joe Carnahan's first movie, Narc, are now made with tiny budgets, and aimed at the arthouse crowd, while almost all big budget crime movies are either cartoonish empty spectacles, pumped up with loud music, macho posturing and spectacular explosions, like Bad Boys 2, or are pointless variations on odd-couple cops, as in Hollywood Homicide.

Narc kicks off with an undercover narcotics officer chasing a junkie through skeezy back yards into a park. The junkie stabs a bystander and takes a pregnant woman hostage; the cop shoots him dead, accidentally wounding the woman and killing her unborn child. Fast and violent, shot on hand-held cameras in chill blues, the sequence sets the tone for the rest of this uncompromising cop-gone-bad flick. At the shooting board investigating the incident, the undercover cop, Nick Tellis (Jason Patric, who, with bristling sideburns, Zapata moustache and long leather coat, could have stepped straight out of one of the 1970's cop movies to which Narc pays homage), reluctantly takes an offer to save his career, and teams up with violent, uncompromising veteran detective Henry Oak (Ray Liotta, stocky as a bull, smouldering with barely contained menace) to investigate the murder of Oak's partner, Michael Calvess. As his new marriage unravels, Tellis becomes increasingly obsessed with Calvess and trawls Detroit's underworld with Oak, uncovering evidence of police corruption and pursuing the mystery of who was with Calvess in the bleak underpass where he was killed, and who fired the fatal shot. The cutaways, flash frames and jump-cuts that inform the story and speed it along are sometimes overdone, but Carnahan has a sly way of smuggling exposition into a scene, makes good use of real locations and handheld cameras to augment his gritty aesthetic, and the long, brutal sequence at the end of the movie, in which Tellis must decide between the stories told by Oak and two drug dealers, is wonderfully tense and knotty with narrative twists. In addition to William Friedkin's piece, the Paramount DVD includes three good 'making of' featurettes, the theatrical trailer, and a lively, good-humoured commentary track by Carnahan and editor John Gilroy.

While Narc was made on the fly with a minuscule budget, Dark Blue, despite its uncompromising attitude and location work in the grimier areas of Los Angeles, is a more mainstream Hollywood offering. Like Narc, it incorporates a full range of cop movie staples: police corruption; hot leads that dead-end with the discovery of a corpse; rap singers playing criminals (Narc has Busta Rhymes and Toronto-based Bishop; Dark Blue has Kurupt and Master P); broken marriages; shoot-outs in derelict or near-derelict buildings; and rule-breaking veteran detectives attempting to dominate their younger partners. Based on a treatment by James Ellroy, its story of the moral crisis of a brutal Los Angeles detective working as a foot soldier for a corrupt police chief, set against the build-up to the riots that followed the end of the trial of the police involved in the infamous Rodney King beating, is essentially an updating of one of L.A. Confidential's narrative threads; like Narc it begins with a shooting gone wrong. Although fresh-faced rookie detective Bobby Keough is absolved of blame, we soon learn that his veteran partner Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) pulled the trigger when Keough froze, and that the shooting was intended as Keough's initiation into a team of corrupt detectives headed by Assistant Police Chief Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson, with a touch of the blarney that recalls L.A. Confidential's Dudley Smith). Dispatched by Van Meter to investigate a brutal quadruple homicide at a convenience store, Perry and Keough are quickly plunged into departmental intrigue. They're ordered to deliver compromising photographs of Van Meter's nemesis, Assistant Police Chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames, whose expression of delicate distaste is set in granite) with his mistress - who happens to be Bobby Keough's casual-but-becoming-serious pick-up. And when they discover that the convenience store massacre was carried out by a couple of low-lifes in the pay of Van Meter and are told to set up two patsies to take the fall, Perry realizes that he's become a liability to Van Meter, Keough's conscience gets the better of him, and both separately converge on the bad guys as the riots kick in. With a script by David Ayer, who also wrote Training Day, and efficiently directed by Ron Shelton, better known for his sports movies, Dark Blue is worth seeing for Russell's intense, career-best performance: risk-taking and movingly subtle in his transformation from gung-ho, casually violent and racist bullshitter to a defeated warrior who realises he's betrayed the principles he once swore to uphold. But despite its authentically seedy locations and meticulous reconstruction of the anarchy of the riots, Dark Blue, like Training Day, is let down by a moralising and not particularly believable ending. In the end it plays out like good, solid Hollywood product, while Narc feels like the real thing. The MGM DVD features a 'making of' documentary divided into three featurettes, a somewhat laboured commentary by Shelton, and the usual photo gallery and theatrical trailer.

These days, grittily authentic, morally ambiguous, risk-taking crime stories are most often to be found in TV shows like The Sopranos or The Shield, rather than big-budget movies which can't risk offending or baffling preview audiences. Now all 13 episodes of the first two seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street, aka the 'The Best Show You're Not Watching', are available in an NBC Region 1 four disc box set. Created by Barry Levinson and inspired by David Simon's account of the time he spent with Baltimore's homicide detectives, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Homicide used handheld cameras to take its stories, often drawn from the everyday surreality of the headlines, onto the streets of Baltimore's urban sprawl. The pilot episode, 'Gone for Goode', establishes out the low-key nature of the detectives' investigations and their focus on obtaining confessions rather than car chases and gun play, and ends with rookie Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) standing over the body of a young girl, Adena Watson, whose murder will haunt him for the rest of Homicide's run. Other stand-outs include 'The Night of the Dead Living', in which the detectives, with no call-outs, hang out in the sweltering squad room; 'Three Men and Adena', in which Bayliss and his partner Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) go head-to-head in the interview room with the prime suspect in the Adena Watson murder; and 'Bop Gun', which focuses on the self-loathing and trauma of the husband (played by Robin Williams) of a murder victim.

The DVDs nicely reproduce the deliberate grain of these early episodes, and fans can now view the episodes in the order the producers, rather than the network, intended. Extras include an interview with producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, a documentary on Homicide detectives from the American Justice series, song listings (after the first season, use of music to underscore the emotional weather of the stories became a trademark feature of the show), cast and crew biographies, and a commentary by Levinson and Fontana on 'Gone for Goode' that's perhaps a little too self-satisfied, but excusably so - for with the creation of this essential, ground-breaking cop show, they had a lot to be satisfied about.

First appeared in Crime Time 36.

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