Interesting, well made, but wildly overrated.

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2004)

In 1950's LA a set of cops - good, bad and everything in-between - solve crime against the background of show biz and political sleaze.
One of those movies that you almost want to throw money against the pay-window to see and yet walk out feeling that you have been short changed. Maybe what people are praising is not the production - but the ideas and background. The age when gossip magazines threw back the covers of Hollywood (for the first time) to reveal actors and players as they really were. Sadly this just a bit of window dressing to tart up a tired old good-cop-bad-cop police drama.
Forget the rave reviews: There is nothing new going on in the foreground. Indeed it works it way to a climax so utterly predictable and shop-worn that it is almost unbelievable. After having some originality and vitality it comes down to a climax that would make a B movie western writer blush!
Stacey is cool, Crowe is mad as hell (and not going to take it), Pierce is the college boy that does everything by the book. The guilty and the half guilty and the guilty-by-association get mixed up, but what the hell, they only get pushed up against a wall and have dirty tricks played on them. Probably how it was way back then.
Bassinger gets an Oscar for doing nothing but looking sexy. I mean what does she do by way of acting? Look like an expensive hooker? Speak like she is jaded and embittered? Sharon Stone was better in Basic Instinct (and others!) and didn't get a mention for that. Even stranger still she seems to be barely in the movie (a glorified extra even?) and had to talked in to taking the role in the first place. Talk about right place and right place!
The trouble with the film is that is gets its novel ideas over too quick and all it has left is to try and bring a bit of poetic justice to a scene where poetic justice was probably very much absent.
Sorry, this a bit of a fraud on the audience, it pretends to be different, pretends to be brave, but in truth it doesn't have to courage of its own convictions. Looking at 1950's Hollywood sleaze on its own might have made a good movie, but this is too frightened of leaving the mainstream to be that film.