Also this issue:

Deadly Passions
Guy Maddin on his sensual, threatening Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.
-Sam Adams

Bad Faith
The shoddy Capturing the Friedmans betrays its already beleaguered subjects.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

June 12-18, 2003

movies

Under Arrest

Another fine mess: Josh Hartnett and Harrison Ford re-enact a scene from <i>Perfect</i>.

Another fine mess: Josh Hartnett and Harrison Ford re-enact a scene from Perfect.

Ron Shelton’s anticop movie cop movie.

by Cindy Fuchs

Much like his last film, Dark Blue, Ron Shelton’s latest guy- bonding saga takes as its backdrop an approximation of recent news from the ’hood. Where Kurt Russell was entangled in LAPD corruption amid the post-Rodney King uprising, Hollywood Homicide sets its detective heroes -- ever-angling Joe (Harrison Ford) and his young partner, K.C. (Josh Hartnett) -- smack in the middle of music-industry drama. Assigned to investigate the murder of a rap group, they’re out of their element and then some.

The case vaguely but pointedly resembles the Biggie and Tupac murders, in that the killer looks to be a Suge Knight figure, an intimidating label executive named Antoine Sartain (Isaiah Washington). The pieces don't quite come together, but coincidence does. The artists are killed in a club owned by Julius (Master P, in entertaining full-on self-love mode). The joke is that, for all their obvious disparity, Joe and Julius immediately strike up a mutually beneficial relationship: Joe's a realtor on the side, and he's able to set up Julius with a buyable joint, a $6-million manse owned by a wealthy codger named Jerry (Martin Landau, looking appropriately baffled).

As Joe's sideline occupation suggests, Hollywood Homicide adopts Shelton's usual tack of deconstructing generic formula. It's a buddy movie where the arguments are petty and off-topic, an action comedy that moves slowly and not very comically and it's less interested in the plot than in secondary characters, detouring to spend time with colorful oddballs, including Lou Diamond Phillips' turn as an undercover cop in drag (which abruptly cuts off) and Andre 2000's appearance as a producer. Joe's lover is a radio psychic named Ruby (Lena Olin, playing the patient, sexy woman usually played by Shelton's wife, Lolita Davidovich, who appears in a small role as a wealthy, well-connected madame). She's also the ex of his archrival, Bennie (underused Bruce Greenwood), who happens now to work for Internal Affairs, and is bent on making Joe's life hell.

Shelton's other two-guys-and-a-girl movies -- Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, Tin Cup and Play It to the Bone -- pit boys against one another who are differentiated by generation, class or race. Here the differences have to do with sensibility and aesthetics. Where Joe is thrice divorced and forever cash-strapped, K.C. teaches yoga classes, beds a different lithe beauty every night and aspires to be an actor.

The case becomes increasingly convoluted, with a side trip into K.C.'s personal past (his cop dad was killed on duty, and the kid has a little vengeance working on the prime suspect) and Joe and Antoine's enmity devolving into an outright ridiculous climax of a chase scene -- sidewalk-driving, crashing, elevator-capering, roof-leaping and terribly awkward punching and kicking. As it's pointedly an unglamorous way to bring down the villain, it seems an apt way to end this anticop movie cop movie.

Hollywood Homicide

Written and Directed by Ron Shelton

A Sony Pictures Releases

Opens Friday at area theaters.