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Narc
**1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of February 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA.
102 minutes. Written and directed by Joe Carnahan. Starring Jason Patric,
Ray Liotta, Dan Leis, Lloyd Adams, Chi McBride, Karen Robinson, Krista Bridges,
Alan Van Sprang.
For most of the way, "Narc" does
a pretty impressive job of keeping away from the ambience of a TV cop show.
It uses similar locations, moods and themes, and yet the filmmaking is a
full-on assault that sweeps us along by keeping us wincing and
gasping.
The movie opens with an astonishing hand-held
camera chase that starts in a drug den, bursts out through the neighbourhood,
over and around fences and other obstacles, and ends up with a showdown set
in a playground, where guns, needles and crosshairs all come into play. There
is a terrifying velocity about the way this is shown -- the photography looks
piercingly overexposed, the sounds are harsh, confused and dogged, and the
camera rushes in such an unwieldy way that the images seem to be lunging
toward a crash.
Over the course of the running time, we will see
poison injections, coughing up of blood unto death, a whole heap of tense
gunfights, a flashback recreation of a guy blowing his head off by attempting
to smoke drugs through a loaded shotgun, a merciless pounding of two guys
strapped together, and, well, you get the idea. This stuff is shown in filmmaking
that can tactfully be called ambient, and more directly a fucked-up muthafucka.
Some scenes look like reasonably normal 35mm footage, others have the piercing
brightness I already mentioned, others are overwhelmingly dark or grainy,
and the soundtrack is a collection of ominously quiet conversations, loud
screams and louder-than-war violence.
Jason Patric plays a former Detroit narcotics
offer who left the force after becoming too involved in his work, which is
to say that he got hooked on heroin and also found himself in a situation
where he fired at a pregnant woman. Now, the captain has got him back for
one last job -- to help Ray Liotta find the guy who killed his partner. If
he is successful in this collaboration on the street, he will be rewarded
with reinstatement and a nice cushy desk job.
Joe Carnahan, who wrote and directed, not only
manages to make this routine stuff penetrating, but keeps it so for a sustained
length of time. It's in the final stretch that "Narc" falls apart, when it
uses all but one of every obvious twist that the screenplay could possibly
choose at that point, and then cancels them out with the other one. The twist
that ends the movie is the one with the most emotional resonance, but twists
are getting irritating, and this is the kind of material where the filmmakers
should be very careful about raising eyebrows, because the slightest hint
of unnecessary cliché is going to mean a lot.
I mean, aren't we a little sick of the last twenty
or thirty years of cop shows and movies where tough city cops with gravely
voices chase punkass bad guys to avenge the deaths of their partners? Do
we need to rehear all that macho swagger about the code of the force, and
the truth of the urban jungle, and the cocksuckers at Internal Affairs, if
the movie doesn't have a distinctive reason to be? "Narc" almost transcends
its origins. The last act lets the air out.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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