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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
Watching a movie about a dirty cop is a lot like watching a monster movie.
There is something unspeakable before us, a violation of the law by the literal “law” itself. And, like the monster movie, the dirty cop movie must, all at the same time, scare us, entertain us and offer us new ways of considering the monster. There is, perhaps, the additional requirement that we think about the harm done to those who are supposedly protected by the police—but who are not protected at all.
With all these requirements in mind, the new film “Dirty” is an interesting effort that comes up short until its intriguing end—which comes too late to save it. By then, we have grown tired of Cuba Gooding Jr. acting way over the top, as if in some White man’s interpretation of what an ignorant Black man really is. (How many times can one man put “MF” into a sentence? Can all of life be filtered through metaphors about oral sex?)
It would be a cheap shot to rate Gooding’s performance as a cheesy rip off of Denzel Washington’s performance in “Training Day” but it might not be a cheap shot to rate the construction of this character as such. Science may not have yet endorsed the practice of cloning but, in Hollywood, the practice is in full effect. You can imagine that an Oscar-winning performance by one Black man might tempt this novice director, Chris Fisher, to give edgy Black crooked cop another drive around the block. Fisher is certainly acquainted with the monster genre. His first feature, “Nightstalker,” was a horror film based on the life of Robert Ramirez, the killer who terrorized Los Angeles during the 1980’s.
By the end of “Dirty,” the bloodbath and gratuitous violence is just too much, even for a monster movie. One rookie cop describes with sympathy a murdered man’s brains spilling from the back of his head like spaghetti (and yet, in a later scene, this rookie is, suddenly, a cold-hearted murderer himself). A cop is shot and his head wound produces a thick flow of blood across a table like spilled pancake syrup.
The story, though difficult to follow at times, is that Salim Abdel (Gooding) and Armando Sancho (Clifton Collins Jr.), former gang members, are longtime police partners who have turned corrupt. Throughout most of the story, which transpires over the course of a day, we see Abdel as the chief instigator who takes money, drugs and whatever he can get from both criminals and the innocent. We know, at some point during this day, that the pair is supposed to testify before Police Internal Affairs about their shooting of an unarmed elderly man but, before they can testify, they are caught up in a scheme to rob drug dealers of a large amount of cash.
There’s a whole lot going on and, for much of the movie, it seems like a whole lot of nothing. There is some interesting direction but, beyond its atmospheric production, “Dirty” offers us little if anything that feels real in its bleak, heartless landscape—certainly not all the crooked cops (which are far more numerous than Abdel and Sancho), not the crazed Latino gang members, not the Jamaican drug dealer, played by Wyclef Jean.
Rule one for monster movies is to make the audience believe that the monster is real.
Esther Iverem’s review of “Dirty” also appeared on www.BET.com. Her new book of poems, ‘Living in Babylon,’ is available at Amazon.com
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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