Hollywood buddies.
When a movie drastically divides critics, it's usually because it's super-serious and innovative (or trying to be). The film's invention (or pretension) inspires hosannahs among the likeminded and an allergic reaction from everybody else. The new buddy cop movie Hollywood Homicide, about two mismatched white cops investigating a murder in Los Angeles' hiphop community, is an exception. It scribbles parody and social comment in its margins with the glee of Mad magazine doodler Sergio Aragones, but for the most part, it just wants to take your money and put a smile on your face.
Yet the reviews thus far have fallen into two camps: loving and poisonous. I loved it, and while I'd never defend it as art, I'd argue that despite its brazenly formulaic concept, Homicide packs more relevant observations about modern life into its 111-minute running time than most super-serious, I-went-to-film-school-and-here's-my-thesis movies can begin to muster.
Directed and cowritten by Ron Shelton and costarring Mt. Rushmore action figure Harrison Ford and flavor-of-the-minute Josh Hartnett, Homicide is shaggy and lighthearted?the latest entry in a long tradition of buddy pictures that began in the 40s with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and has continued through the present day, as exemplified by the Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon pictures, which are basically Hope-Crosby road pictures with body counts. Such movies are packed with near-prehistoric slapstick and verbal jousting that's either improvised or seems like it is. The biggest joke of all is the movie's existence. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on a confection as airy as lemon meringue pie; actors scamper through the picture like first-graders in the throes of a sugar rush.
It's the right kind of movie for Shelton, a comic humanist who's interested mostly in fleeting moments and throwaway details, and who never showed much interest in narrative. His self-consciously serious dramas, Cobb and this year's Dark Blue (a grimmer twin of Homicide, complete with racial elements and a cop corruption angle) were disorganized and lumpy. Even his best comedies, Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump, got lost in the momentary byplay of friendship and romance and periodically had to remind themselves to move the story along. The narrative of Homicide?Suge Knightish, control-freak record producer (Isaiah Washington) quashes a would-be revolt by his young, resentful clients with a gangland-style nightclub hit?is so negligible that Shelton barely seems to notice it. He waits until half an hour into the picture to let us know that the radio psychic (Lena Olin) the hero phoned in an early scene is his girlfriend, and that she's also the ex of an internal affairs cop (Bruce Greenwood) who's investigating the hero for "commingling of funds." The picture's plot is really just an excuse to riff on contemporary city life?from cellphones, money troubles and media madness to the subtle and unsubtle tension between ethnic groups, genders and generations.
But it's anything but heavy. Homicide is the kind of movie that devotes its third act to a demolition derby featuring a sedan, SUVs, dozens of cop cars, a subway train, a little girl's bicycle, multiple gunfights, a rooftop slugfest and a sky full of news choppers covering the whole spectacle live, with blowdried, lipsticked "air babes" providing narration.
Ford plays Joe Gavilan, a two-fisted veteran homicide cop with three ex-wives, two kids and major cash flow problems. He knows he's not as young as he used to be?Ford and Olin's sex scene is one of those hot/goofy grownup couplings Shelton does better than any working director; before getting down to business, Joe jokes that he really should take some gingko so he can remember where he put his Viagra?but even if Joe resisted admitting his age, his fresh-faced partner, K.C. Calden (Hartnett) would force the issue. K.C. doesn't smoke pot (at least, we never see him doing it), but he has a stoner's slowed-down, laid-back vibe?the go-to personality of modern, young white hipsters. He's a yoga teacher who studies eastern religion and takes it seriously?so seriously that when he admits that his svelte female students keep luring him off the path to enlightenment, the admission is both funny and touching. (Hartnett, a likeable male ingenue who never impressed me before, does fine work here; at times, his passive machismo and two-beats-behind-the-action responses reminded me of the young John Travolta.) K.C. listens to hiphop and seems to barely recognize the concept of race.
These qualities set him apart from Joe, a baby boomer who loves Motown (his cellphone ringer plays the opening notes of "My Girl") and admits he just doesn't get rap. "You're not supposed to get it," says the mother of a murder witness, played by Gladys Knight.
Backing up its themes via stunt casting, Homicide is strewn with generation-gap supporting turns by musicians and movie actors, including Smokey Robinson as a cabbie, Master P as a club-owning would-be rap impresario, Shelton spouse Lolita Davidovich as a Heidi Fleiss-style Hollywood madam, Kurupt as a pants-wetting murder witness who pathetically tries to escape Joe and K.C. in a pedal boat, Martin Landau as a Robert Evans-like movie mogul who's 30 years past his prime, Frank Sinatra Jr. as the producer's lawyer, Dwight Yoakam as the bad guy's icy white enforcer and Robert Wagner as Robert Wagner.
Homicide serves up a rare, welcome mix of ludicrous cop movie melodrama and pleasingly mundane details. Shelton and cowriter Robert Souza?a former LAPD cop who took up fiction in the 70s when his colleague, Joseph Wambaugh, became the Norman Mailer of cop potboilers?are journalist-showmen. Every couple of minutes there's a gag that gets a laugh because it's rooted in life?a Post-it grace note.
For instance, like many Americans in our economically troubled times, both Joe and K.C. have side careers. Joe's a real estate broker who learned his trade in a seminar at a hotel and inappropriately hands out business cards after interviewing witnesses and suspects, despite being investigated by his own department; one of the film's more amusing subplots finds Joe desperately trying to sell the movie mogul's house to Master P's club owner. (The latter is unimpressed with the producer's tennis court because he hates tennis. "Too much running," he mutters.) In addition to K.C.'s yoga gig, he's a wannabe actor who's playing Stanley Kowalski in a hole-in-the-wall production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Everybody in this L.A.-to-the-bone production has thoughts on, or a relationship to, celebrity. Some want it, others have it, others had it and want it back and still others (notably Joe) don't want it, and treat their not wanting it as proof of integrity. The movie's opening credits emphasize this point with understated confidence: Roscoe performs "I Love Cali" beneath a time-lapse montage of L.A. imagery. Each composition is built around the word "Hollywood," as it appears in restaurants, hotel and business logos, street signs, license plates and the famous Hollywood sign itself. The point, while subtly made, could not be more clear: Hollywood is everywhere.