Narc

The things I will watch in the name of complete coverage -- all genres, all types, all moods. This film has an extended scene of a three-week-old dead guy in a bathtub with his head shot off. Crime scene, cops with handkerchiefs over their mouths, a blasé medical examiner, and all you can think is -- get me away from this room!! Horrific just reading about it, right? Well, that's the tenor of the film. And if you want gritty, if you want to see what being a narcotics officer or inner-city cop might be like, or just what the world we try and ignore is like, than this is your film. (Hey, and it's set in Detroit, too.) It's produced by the team of Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, which might be surprising to some. It's somewhat surprising to me, Cruise backing this kind of film, a film that is never going to make it big, chiefly due to its grittiness. The film uses some obvious set-ups (e.g., one cop can shoot, the other can't, the lead character's wife is upset about him taking on another job), but makes subtle differences that keep it interesting. Ray Liotta is fantastic, as usual, although still doing his freak impression. Jason Patric is restrained, which often in his case is just plain boring, but here works to great effect. I'm not sure what the intent of the film is -- illustrating the difficulty of being a cop, meting out justice even if not by the rules, the residual effects of being a narc -- but the mood of it does the job. The twist ending doesn't hurt either.

year: 2002
length: 105 min.
rating: 3.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272207/combined