Rampart

Woody Harrelson is a pretty good actor, and in his previous film with director Oren Moverman, the two made a pretty good film, THE MESSENGER. RAMPART could almost be called an actor’s movie, giving almost all of the screentime to Harrelson, and allowing him to dominate the film as a crooked, Rampart-division, 90’s era, L.A. cop named Dave. Dave’s a real tough son-of-a-bitch, beating up suspects, and maintaining a tough-as-nails authority figure in both his job and at home with a convoluted family situation, basically having two daughters and a wife whose sister he had also had a fling with. One day regularly acting like a crazy asshole, Dave gets hit in his car, jolts out to arrest the driver of the other car, and is hit in the face by the door as the man flees. Understandably, he pursues him, but after tackling him to the ground, beats him an inch from death. The whole thing is caught on tape, and Dave becomes the poster boy for corruption in the L.A. police department. He resists, attempting to maintain the position he has the most power in, but quickly descends as fast as the movie’s quality does. Dave is basically shown to be mentally ill, but the way that Moverman establishes this is shoddy, losing any of the regularity that was earlier established. The routine of Dave’s life is completely deteriorated, and the film becomes a series of vignette-like situations in which Dave shows us that he’s a fucking asshole. But such an obvious “revelation” is drilled into our heads with annoying, faux-arty over-saturated shots, and even Harrelson’s performance becomes rooted in the badness of the film overall. Essentially, Moverman tries to prove to us that Dave is a crazy person, but that’s so clear from the start that the film becomes boring.

★★/5