Jay Leno skit meets B-flick gun porn

Rating: 2/10 (25 December 2005)

I would have given it one star, but I wanted to be fair just in case the second half of the movie that I failed to see after I stopped it and took it back to the video rental store was any good.
This movie reads as a compendium of every sick thing you can think of to make a cop do, and it's done to the point where you almost have to laugh because you're waiting for the point where Denzel steals lollipops from babies and kicks widowed and terminally ill old ladies out of their homes for failing to pay rent just so they had their bases covered to show just how screwed up Denzel's character is. It even starts off with some really cheesy smart-ass talk about Denzel having his morning paper interrupted by Ethan Hawke and so Ethan had better have a really damn entertaining story to justify interrupting his "entertaining" newspaper.
I dunno. I mean, if you are a real bad ass like Denzel's character who is bored to tears by Ethan Hawke's traffic stop story and you like to routinely shoot people and split their ill-begotten cash, what exactly do you find entertaining in the newspaper? The recipe section? The legal notices? Or is it just some dribble from a screenplay writer who was churning out a gun porn film that is one of the dime a dozen that hover somewhere above the straight to video benchmark, and are mostly forgettable as they are paint-by-numbers plots with a mildly interesting twist and stocked with at least one recognizable name? Pah! At the point that the Russians showed up, I was completely lost. I turned it off and went to bed.