Good material squandered

Rating: Null/10 (16 April 2002)

Spoilers follow.
We're presented with a choice, between a policeman who's pure but ineffectual, and one who's corrupt but (as the cliché has it) "gets results". I hope everyone will prefer the former. (I hope, also, that everyone will realise that in real life, the choice is otherwise, and that the most corrupt police forces are also the most inefficient and useless.)
Unfortunately, Ethan Hawke's woefully under-described and thin character (the actor does what he can) doesn't have the guts to be pure. TWICE his superior, who might as well have horns growing out of his forehead, offers him the chance to walk back to his old, honourable, by no means unpleasant job, at no cost or risk, without losing face before any third party - and the fool refuses, for no reason at all that we can see. We can only presume he doesn't want to appear naïve. It would only be possible to warm to a man this spineless if we knew something about him.
But the key choice he's offered is a bit less obvious. Only a bit. Anyone ought to be able to see that everything the narcotics squad does counts for nothing - for less than nothing. For every drug dealer, large or small, that they put away, another will leap up to take his place. But the market forces that make this the case do not apply in the case of, say, rape: and when Jake saw a rape about to take place, he had the chance to actually do some good, by dropping whatever shadowy nothingwork Alonzo wanted him to be getting on with and intervene. He chose to intervene. (Successfully - but for some reason he doesn't actually arrest the rapists. Why not? Did he require the co-operation of his superior? Was he merely caving in, once again, to moral pressure? Are we meant to be able to work this out?) And it's fitting that his one good deed turns out to be what saved his life - in fact, to have been almost the only thing that COULD have saved his life, given that he didn't have the sense to walk away from the narcotics squad altogether.
I liked this touch. A pity everything that happens after the key scene with the bathtub is just standard revenge rampage wrap-up (so muddled that perhaps I'm being generous in using a word like "revenge", which implies a goal). And a pity that everything leading up to the trap in which Jake is caught is just so flat. Fluid, bold photography, a good sense of rhythm and strong performances can't breathe life into the opening third or the conclusion. Nor can guns. But there's real promise and fire in the middle bit.