adminCast: Stephen Baldwin, Luis Guzman, Michel McGlone, Chris Penn, Gina Gershon, Joey O’Hara, Eyrie Knight, Marlo Vela.
Director: Bruno Barreto
Running time: 101 minutes
Age restriction: Adults only
Type of film: police/Mafia
On viewing this classical “cops-and-robbers” film, an anonymous, ecclesiastical expression of the early 19th century comes to mind and is fully validated.
“He who would sup with the devil needs a long spoon.”
This film is set on the very downtown New York City streets on which I played and often went hungry all through the 1930s.
It comes as a great surprise that so little has changed.
In paying close attention to the motivating factors in the characters’ illicit and illegal behaviour, very strong memories of what took place in and around my own family are regurgitated.
A finger must be here pointed at a problem, which is almost totally ignored in civic political circles. In urban America the ranks of the police departments are teeming with the very same young men whose childhoods were spent cheek-by-jowl with the more-or-less violence of the Mafia’s influence.
I strongly recommend this superb film in that it deals fully and honestly with the conflict of interest which almost daily confronts a young police officer determined to live up to his oath of office.
Bo Dietl (Stephen Baldwin – the third eldest of the four acting Baldwin brothers all born in New York) is, at the film’s outset, shown as a courageous, dutiful officer of the law.
The scene in question is one which Hollywood does not always get right. But here it does. Bo and his partner, Duke, are called to the scene of a homicide where a Latino man (Luis Guzman) who has
just shot and killed his wife is screaming “bloody-murder” while crushing in his arms his terrified three-year-old daughter.
It is understood by the discerning movie-goer that Officer Bo Dietl’s heroic, almost suicidal efforts, successfully saving the child’s life at the risk of his own, are meant to presage other, more questionable activities which call into question “whose-side-are-you-on?”
We are led to believe from Hollywood films that the degree of friendship between police partners who work together day after day is as if they are almost – if not actually – “blood brothers”. My own experience, working at one time in law enforcement in America, is that this is an accurate depiction.
When it is revealed to Bo – as it is revealed to us in the audience – that Bo’s police partner is very deeply in debt to those very gangsters with whom they have grown up – and pressure is being applied – Bo, has to decide where his loyalty lies. A fantastic, highly recommended film for the serious, adult film-goer.
Online Reporter