Probes the Seamy Underbelly Beneath the Surface Allure of 1950's L.A!

Rating: 9/10 (16 April 2015)

Spicy and boiling-hot, the sensational noir style crime drama L.A. Confidential is a morality play disguised as pulp fiction - a sprawling saga of venality and redemption set against a flashy 1950's Los Angeles backdrop of easy money, blazing guns and cheap, illicit thrills told with a cool eye and overwhelming evil.
Based on James Ellroy's 1990 novel, the movie's L.A. is a shining place where almost everybody has a guilty secret. That includes the triumvirate of LAPD cops - the flamboyant "Hollywood Jack" Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), the bare-knuckled brute veteran Wendell "Bud" White (Russell Crowe) and the straight-arrow, rich kid Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) - who are thrown together during several investigations and the scandalous tabloid journalist Hudgeons (Danny DeVito) who spews them out to the public. When a nightclub massacre leaves six dead, including a disgraced ex-cop, three black juveniles are arrested soon thereafter. But this apparently cut-and-dried case leads to more insidious developments. As our lead cops dig deeper into what at first seems a simple shootout in a downtown diner, they come to believe that the bust was a setup, the dead suspects fall guys and soon discover links to a furtive call-girl ring run by vice king Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn), whose hookers (including Lynn Bracken played by Kim Basinger) have been surgically altered to resemble famous Hollywood stars. Despite their antagonism toward each other - exacerbated by their mutual attraction to Lynn - Exley and White link up to get to the bottom of it all. Drugs, prostitution, dirty politics in high places and mob wars - everything that feeds scurrilous magazines like Hudgeon's 'Hush Hush' becomes the reality the three cops disinter. And it gets worse as they go deeper.
Ingeniously adapted by Curtis Hanson and his co-writer, Brian Helgeland, L.A.Confidential is a juicy noir stew of amorality that's gives us a richly populated, self-contained little world that operates according to its own rules. That world is unsavory and grim, an un-magical kingdom of gleaming mansions and corpses rotting in basements. But Hanson and his actors make it a world we believe. The three central cops are all pungent, colorful and terrifically well-played; their combined charisma almost smashing through the screen. Spacey oozes ring-a-ding charm and is slyly hilarious as preening, showboat cop Vincennes. Crowe bristles with hair-trigger tension and exudes a unique and sexy toughness. Pearce makes a wonderful prude who perfectly catches the "no-flies-on-me" swagger of a rich boy on the rise. Although she's playing a stock character, Basinger exudes a chaste sultriness and is terrific as a Veronica Lake double. The large supporting cast is tops, too. It's hard to imagine a better slimy scandal-sniffer than DeVito, a colder-hearted cop than Cromwell or a smugger vice lord than Strathairn.
L.A. Confidential is a movie bull's-eye: noir with an attitude, a thriller packing punches that gives up its evil secrets with a smile.