Hold up your badge so they'll know your a policeman

Rating: 9/10 (28 June 2006)

***SPOILERS**** With big time L.A hoodlum Mickey Cohen, Paul Guilfoyle, sent up the river in a federal penitentiary on a tax-evasion rap a vacuum had been created in the city's organized crime hierarchy. Hoodlums descend on L.A, like a hoard of locusts, from all over the country in order to fill it. The L.A police Department has the head of the organized crime task force Capt.Dudley, James Cromwell, given the assignment to keep the city from having another Mickey Cohen take over the mob. Capt. Dudley does it with both "swift and merciless" justice in many cases not caring a lick about the law ,that he was sworn to uphold, to do it.
Hard and brutal movie about a brutal time post-war L.A. With the city trying to clean up it's shoddy image by having, among other things, a Dragnet-like TV show "Badge of Honor" with L.A cop Det. Sgt. Jack Vincennes, Kevin Spacey, as the shows technical adviser. "Badge of Honor" shows how efficient and honest the city's cops are where at the same time in real life L.A has one of the worst records of police corruption of all the major cities in the United States. An epidemic of corruption that reaches into the very highest echelons of the city government and the District Attorneys office.
Straight as an arrow cop, one of the very few on the force, Det. Ed Exley, Guy Pearnce, gets a call at the local precinct about a robbery at the Nite Owl Diner. With no one available he answers the call himself by driving over to see what he could do. What Exley didn't know at the time was that he would get caught up in not only a mass murder but a cover up of the killings. That cover up would go straight up to the LAPD office that's in charge of combating organized crime headed by the very highly decorated and greatly admired Capt. Dudley.
The film "L.A Confidential" has both the clean cut and soft spoken Det. Exley and his rival on the force the brutal and Neanderthal-like Officer Bud White, Russell Crowe, end up working together to crack the Nite Owl murder case. This even after it was solved with Det. Exley getting all the credit and a promotion in solving it. White and Exley who had no use or love for each other slowly came to the realization that they were both being manipulated by forces beyond their control. With big time pimp and highly successful L.A businessman Pirice Patchett, David Stratharin, being one of those pulling the strings.
Patchett running a high-class call girl operation called Fleur-de-lis has his hookers made to look like movie stars. One of them ended up among those murdered at the Nite Owl a Rita Heyworth-look alike named Susan Lefferts, Amber Smith. Also among the dead at the now-infamous eatery was Det.Sgt. Dick Stensland, Graham Beckel. Sgt. Stensland used to be Officer White's partner before he was drummed out of the department for abusing prisoners in his custody.
Pinning the Nite Owl killings on a trio of inner city hoodlum Sugar Ray Cullins, Jeremiah Birkett, and his two partners in crime Louis Fontaine & Ty Jones, Salim Grant & Kareem Washington, had the case just about solved. Later with the three accused murderers escaping from the precinct lock-up and ending up shot and killed by the perusing cops, which included the now promoted Det.Let Exley, just about iced the case.
It's then that strange things started to happen, with a number of former Mickey Cohen associates getting rubbed out, that Det. Sgt Vincennes began to check out the deceased and disgraced Det. Sgt. Slensland's record. Vincennes finds a number of cases that he was on back in 1939-41 that has him linked to Capt. Dudly and another drummed out of the department corrupt cop Leland "Buzz" Meeks,Darrell Sandeen. These decade old cases had to do with getting paid off by the Cohen mob to look the other way on their criminal activities. All this investigating on Det. Sgt. Vinceenes' part eventually lead to his murder.
Everything started to crystallized before the Det. Sgt. Vincennes eyes in the mob-LAPD connection that now involves a massive and secret attempt to take over Mickey Cohen's criminal empire. An empire of gambling drugs prostitution and murder for hire,or Murder Inc, by non-other then elements in the LAPD itself! The crooked L.A cops used, when murder would blow their cover, the sleazy and powerful Pierce Patchett and equally squalid Hush-Hush magazine editor Sid Hodges, Danny DeVito, to do their dirty work. This involved Patchett's Fleur-de-lis call girls getting involved, and being photographed,with anyone who's a threat to the corrupt cops operations. One of those blackmail was non-other then the L.A District Attorney Ellis Loew, Ron Rifkin.
Penetrating and powerful film with the beautiful Kim Besinger as Veronica Lake-Look alike Lynn Bracken getting involved with both Officer White and Det. Let. Exley. Both cops end up pooling their talents, of brute force and keen brains, to try to break the reign of terror and corruption that infiltrated the LAPD.