Cop

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Even I will admit that this was an odd, obscure choice of a movie for me to Netflix. It is not a treasured classic, so it's not part of my K2K. It's not some cult genre film that I wanted to catch up with. It's a mostly forgotten and dismissed hard-boiled neo-noir detective movie from the 80's, which is not a decade known for making a lot of memorable noir-ish films. I'm not sure how I even heard of it, but I put it on my queue a long, long time ago. I know I must have been tempted by the idea of James Woods in a dark, noirish thriller.

I had this bad vibe going into it that it was going to be terrible. It wasn't, it was actually kinda good, but in a weird way where some of it is awesome and some of it is really shitty.

It's based on a James Ellroy book, and I'm going to go ahead and assume without researching that the better dialogue and the crazy-insane plot comes from the book. And I'll go ahead and blame the terrible synthesizer music and some of the more inexplicably bad scenes on the writer/director.

James Woods is great in this, and I did love the very abrupt ending that skips all the boring, obligatory wrap-up shit movies usually feel the need to have. And... you know what? This is an OK movie, but it's a minor pleasure, it's 20 years old and has probably been forgotten for a good reason. I have more stuff I could say about it, but who cares? We all have more important shit to do.