Cop Land

National Review, Sept 29, 1997 by John Simon

What a dreary movie Cop Land is! James Mangold's firstling, Heavy, was worse yet, but garnered enough praise to enable Mangold to make an expensive film with four stars in it -- a mightier dud. Still, given the big names, it may prove a moneymaker, which is all the moguls care about; quality is something they wouldn't recognize if they fell over it.

It seems that New York City transit cops, after a hard day's work of deworming the Big Apple, prefer to go home to a peaceful little New Jersey town such as the pseudonymous Garrison. Here, with a little help from the Mafia, they can enjoy the quiet comfort of suburban housing. One evening, though, as one of them, Murray ''Superboy'' Babitch, is driving home across the bridge, two larking black youths deliberately sideswipe his car. On edge, Babitch gives chase and shoots them dead. Soon, the Garrison garrison is there to help. While Ray Donlan, a relative, spirits him away and gives out that he jumped off the bridge, another cop, Rucker, plants guns on the victims. The cops are back at their nightly hangout, the Four Aces bar, where civilians are excluded. The moment's fun consists of a fight between Gary ''Figgsy'' Figgis, a narc who consumes what he confiscates, and Rucker, whom he pins against the wall with a dart he sticks up his nose. Ignoring the ruckus, Freddy Heflin, Garrison's sheriff, despised by the men in blue, concentrates on his pinball game; when he runs out of quarters, he empties a nearby parking meter. Freddy failed to make it as a New York cop because of deafness in one ear, incurred when he saved a girl, Liz, from drowning inside her car. This is sketchily shown in a flashback that, like so much else here, is as easy to negotiate as the Minoan labyrinth. The decent Freddy continues to love Liz even after she marries Joey, a young cop now cheating on her with Ray Donlan's slatternly wife, Rose. But mild-mannered Freddy doesn't try to capitalize on that. He even swerves into a tree rather than hit a deer, then walks through part of the movie with a wounded nose that may be an hommage to Jack Nicholson's mutilated proboscis in Chinatown. When Babitch's body can't be found, Moe Tilden, an Internal Affairs officer investigating the case, tries to enlist Freddy's help. Moe suspects Ray, an old pal and rival from Police Academy days, and though he, too, looks down on overweight, hangdog Freddy, this insider-outsider is his only hope for support. As subplots accumulate, there is, briefly, the case of Freddy's assistant, Cindy, a bright-eyed young policewoman who will eventually quit in disgust. At first uneager to meddle with the men in blue, Freddy, having glimpsed Babitch in Ray's car, nevertheless starts investigating; like Gary Cooper's sheriff in High Noon, he turns into the lone justicer taking on an evil world. Aside from muddy storytelling, there are individually inept scenes, such as the one where the very cops hiding Babitch try to get rid of him by drowning him. He, too, turns into a loner, like Figgsy, who, burning down his own house for the insurance money, accidentally kills his girlfriend. But no one is so alone as Freddy, set off from the rest even by isolating layers of unseemly fat; Sylvester Stallone plays him with the steadily woebegone countenance of a crucified bloodhound. Yearningly he gazes at the Manhattan skyline across the water, a tantalizing El Dorado that keeps eluding him. The climax of Cop Land is as uninspired as it is unbelievable. But the star turns, other than Stallone's, are persuasive, even if they are re-enactments of trademark routines. Robert De Niro (Moe) crinkles the area around his smiling eyes into something as pointillistic as the best of Seurat; Harvey Keitel (Ray) is once again cannily, commandingly corrupt. As Figgis, Ray Liotta is as manic as ever, but this time in a somewhat more sympathetic mode. Michael Rappaport, as Babitch, portrays befuddlement with vast conviction. As Rucker, whose dart-penetrated nose sheds not a drop of blood, Robert Patrick may be the scariest of all. The women have ancillary roles that are not even thoroughly thought out. There is no perspicuous reason for Joey to cheat on his charming Liz with the fishwifely Rose, and Annabella Sciorra and Cathy Moriarty can coax no more depth out of those ill-written parts than Janeane Garofalo can squeeze out of Cindy, introduced early and promptly dropped until near the end. One thing is clear: Mangold is obsessed with weight; I gather he himself is on the chubby side. Perhaps he should join Weight Watchers and start making movies whose weight is in their artistry rather than their protagonists.