SCREEN
Rampart (15)
(15) 108mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Woody Harrelson is captivating and charismatic as the corrupt cop sinking beneath the weight of his own moral degradation.
REVIEW
In a wired and mesmeric performance, Woody Harrelson creates a colossal character that occupies director Oren Moverman's hovering lens for the length of the film.
So sprawling is Harrelson's self-destructive cop Dave "Date-Rape" Brown that the impressive roster of support acts can barely entice the fidgety camera their way.
Which is a staggering accomplishment considering the roster of A-listers lined up to appear in this edgy, raw study of man trying to maintain his balance in a world built on soft rot and mushy degradation.
The smokily dissolute attorney Robin Wright (in shattering form), Sigourney Weaver, Ice Cube, Ned Beatty, barely-there Steve Buscemi as well as his former wives Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon become mere buttress for the grand crumbling edifice of Harrelson's cigarette-chomping charmer as he stares oblivion in the face with a bull-headed confidence in his own longevity.
Oren Moverman took a script from James Ellroy about the Rampart corruption scandal in late '90s LA and found a man who seemed to encapsulate the good, the bad and the ugly of power gone wrong.
When he gets caught on tape beating on a suspect, Brown becomes the focus for the city-wide fury. Rough, tough and with his own code of conduct the politics begin to take their toll and Brown's increasingly wild thrashing only serves to sink him further.
He can quote the law, win the lady and strike a canny deal but he has survived beyond his time and the tar pits, you sense, are a-calling.
That Harrelson has us rooting for this foul-mouthed bully at the same time as we want to hose off his slime is some achievement.
Ultimately, though, Moverman provides no answers and no resolution and the fate of Dave Brown, natural born killer, is just another scrap caught in the swirl of a busy, careless city.
