Copyright © 2003 by Tony Medley

 This is one of Writer-Director-Producer Ron Shelton’s best efforts.  The opening credits of all the signs in Los Angeles that say Hollywood, and the first two minutes hold your interest.  Then the movie tanks, despite a valiant effort by Harrison Ford.  Shelton never fails to disappoint.  He gets A List talent and makes Z List movies.

 The story is incomprehensible.  Joe Gavilan (Ford) and K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett) are detectives, partners in the LAPD trying to solve a murder of a rap group.  There’s a subplot about an Internal Affairs guy trying to set Gavilan up.  Gavilan’s also a real estate agent and Calden a wannabe actor, two B plots that are supposed to provide joke lines.  Instead they’re just ludicrous.

 I guess this is supposed to be a buddy film with Gavilan and Calden always bickering but beneath the surface we are supposed to know they’re going to bond.  Problem is that there’s zero chemistry between Ford and Hartnett.  Laurel and Hardy they ain’t.

 And the love scenes between Ford and whoever those women in the film are, are embarrassing.  While I’m at it, who are those women in the movie and why are they there?  One of them’s a madam.  Another’s a clairvoyant.  What’s their connection with Gavilan?  Shelton apparently wants to keep this a secret.  As to Calden, why he’s even in the movie is anybody’s guess, although there is another subplot about his father’s murder, which doesn’t seem to bother him much until the final denouement.

 The last half of the movie is the obligatory ploy for the vacuous screenwriter and director with nothing to say, the car chase.  Shelton validates his lack of original thought by showing the longest, most absurd car chase ever filmed.  It goes all over Hollywood.  When it’s over Gavilan and Calden are still chasing the bad guys.  And about those bad guys.  They became bad guys without any plot line whatever.  We, the viewers, know they’re bad guys because we see them doing bad things.  But there’s nothing ever explained in the film why the LAPD would know they are the bad guys.  First they look like good guys.  Then with no evidence other than a tip from an undercover cop and with nothing else that could even qualify as a clue, they’re bad guys being chased all over. 

 Oh, another thing…one minute Gavilan’s being investigated and charged as being a bad cop.  The next minute every cop in the LAPD is on his side chasing the bad guys. Huh?

 I can’t sign off without commenting on the most inane interrogation this side of Fearless Fosdick.  Gavilan and Calden are put in separate, but side-by-side, interrogation rooms.  Gavilan’s cell phone keeps ringing.  Every time it rings it’s sitting on the table between Gavilan and his interrogator.  The interrogator is frustrated because it keeps ringing and when he tries to grab it Gavilan always beats him to it.  The interrogator never thinks to just take it away from him.  This happens at least four times.  Calden, on the other hand, takes off his shoes and assumes a yoga position on the table in his room.  Neither interrogator knows what to do.  Even a movie doesn’t have the right to be this stupid.

 June 20, 2003

 The End

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