police

Maniac Cop (1988)

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After venturing further into the neon-lit abyss of his own imagination with Her Private Hell (a self-referencing mashup of The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives), Nicolas Winding Refn is reportedly outsourcing pitches for his next planned project: a remake of the 1988 novelty slasher Maniac Cop. It’s easy to see the appeal. Like most of Refn’s work, Maniac Cop has a great look and a great hook but is in no rush to pay off the promise of its premise. Screenwriter Larry Cohen turns cops into the same abstract, high-concept source of terror as he would an inanimate object (like the killer yogurt in The Stuff and the killer ambulance in The Ambulance) or a prehistoric beast (like Quetzalcoatl in Q: The Winged Serpent and the voice of God in God Told Me To). Whereas Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, “What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?”, his script for Maniac Cop asks, “What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?” It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable. VHS era schlockteur James Glickenhaus (Shakedown, The Exterminator) offers some credibility to the film’s action cinema bona fides, and Blue Underground founder William Lustig does a cromulent job in the director’s chair making sure its visual style is up to snuff with other slicked-up slashers of its era. So why doesn’t it move? So much work went into the basic look, premise, and car-chase trailer clips of Maniac Cop that no one thought to put those individual pieces in motion in any convincing way. Its genre elements sit still onscreen purely to be admired, not to accomplish anything tangible or measurable, just like in a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

One reason for Maniac Cop‘s stubborn inertia is that there’s no clear, continuous lead character anchoring its narrative. For a while, Tom Atkins is heavily featured as a detective on the case of a mysterious series of randomized slayings, each attributed to an abnormally large, uniformed police officer. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree phones it in as Atkinson’s flagrantly corrupt higher-up, acting as the film’s extended celebrity cameo. An unusually subdued Bruce Campbell eventually steps in as the lead suspect in the case, a tall-enough cop who’s caught having an affair with a coworker just before his wife is violently murdered. Campbell is just one of many mutant freaks with badges working at his local station, and the movie continues character hopping until every butt-chinned cop who disgraces the screen is a credible suspect; every cop is a maniac until proven innocent. That investigation is mostly a distraction from the movie’s main mission, though, which is making high-concept horror tropes out of the everyday fear of being alone with an armed police officer. Despite its urban setting and all of its police-force paraphernalia, Maniac Cop is largely a by-the-books slasher, with a towering, undead killer stumbling from one slaying to the next in a series of isolated novelty set pieces. The initial shock of these killings is that the mutant cop is specifically targeting innocent people, committing random acts of violence simply because he has the authority to do so. A concerned citizen tells a TV news reporter, “I tell my kids, you see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.” Another shoots a cop in the face after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The movie may not progress past that basic premise in a satisfying way, but it is shockingly honest about real-life cops’ fascistic relationship with the citizens they supposedly serve & protect.

Maniac Cop eventually has to deliver on its title by narrowing its field of potential suspects down to one specific maniacal police officer, no longer shielding his identity behind backlighting & shadowy silhouettes. The legend of the undead maniac Matthew Cordell is what roots this movie firmly in the slasher genre, in a naked attempt to establish a Jason Voorhees figure of its very own. Cordell wasn’t always a maniac. When alive, he played the mythical figure of the Good Cop on city streets, much to the annoyance of the Bad Cops on the force and the corrupt politicians in City Hall, whom he threatened to expose by being an uptight rule follower. As punishment, he was framed for fictional acts of police brutality and sentenced to prison, where he was promptly murdered by rabid criminals happy to kill any cop they could get their hands on. It’s upon resurrection that Cordell becomes a homicidal maniac himself, having been corrupted and mutated by an unjust legal system. He’s a ginormous, unignorable manifestation of all cops’ corruption & brutality, and he spends the first half of the movie representing all cops as one shadowy figure before his rotting, zombified face is revealed to the audience. Also like the Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Angela Bakers of slasher tradition, his original thematic purpose is immediately distorted & diluted in his return sequels. In Maniac Cop II, Matt Cordell joins forces with a local serial killer to seek personal revenge against the cops & prisoners who initially wronged him, no longer attacking random innocent citizens on city streets. In Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, he attacks sleazy TV journalists who sensationalize false accounts of police brutality for ratings, effectively letting cops off the hook for their everyday villainy by exposing it as fake news.

In the limited capacity that anyone discusses Maniac Cop in recent years, the film’s legacy has developed into a kind of Alien/Terminator situation, where its louder, flashier sequel Maniac Cop II gets praised as the best of its series for featuring more & better action scenes, while the original remains superior on a purely artistic level. And, like with Alien & Terminator, its sequels are so fun to watch you can’t even complain about it without sounding like a dweeb who doesn’t know how to party. Maniac Cop II is delightfully over-the-top, throwing as many car chases, chainsaws, strip routines, and explosions at the screen as it can in the name of VHS-warped entertainment. Maniac Cop III is a little more subdued at first, but it gradually builds to an elaborate high speed car chase where Matt Cordell is fully on fire for the final third of the runtime, driving a stolen cop car towards the proverbial gates of Hell. Both sequels feature extensive body burn stunts that are guaranteed to drop an audience’s jaws, while the audacity of the first film is purely conceptual. It’s extremely rare to find an American motion picture about daily police work that doesn’t make heroes out of monsters or at least excuse cops’ monstrous behavior as the work of a few bad apples. Even as a franchise, Maniac Cop can’t avoid backsliding into copaganda by its final outing, and its only clear, coherent commentary about the corruptive nature of the system can be found in the original Larry Cohen screenplay (despite the fact that Cohen also penned the sequels). There’s a good chance that Refn’s take on the material will return to the core, simple idea that everyday cops are terrifying alien monsters akin to a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers or Her Private Hell‘s The Leather Man. The longer he dwells on that point without distraction or relief, the better, but I guess an explosion or two wouldn’t hurt too much.

-Brandon Ledet

Undercover Maisie (1947)

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And so, at last, we find ourselves on our final outing with Maisie Ravier. Before we get into Undercover Maisie, however, I’d like to offer an elegy for the Maisie films that never were and must only exist in our hearts and imaginations. Maisie the Pledge, wherein Maisie enters college as a non-traditional student, joins a sorority, discovers that the dean’s wife is embezzling from the university, exposes her, and falls in love with an English professor. Maisie on the Orient Express, which finds Maisie solving a not-too-vicious murder on a snowed-in train, becoming engaged to the movie’s Poirot stand-in during the final minutes. Maisie Goes to Washington, where Maisie visits her mother’s retirement home and discovers elder mistreatment happening there, and she goes all the way to the Supreme Court to put a stop to it, charming a handsome young lawmaker in the process. Chairman Maisie, which finds Maisie securing the acquittal of an innocent man by finding the still-living supposed victim while breaking out of being sequestered, all while softening the heart of a hard-nosed district attorney. Mayday for Maisie, Whoopsie Maisie (Brandon’s suggestion), Natural History Maisie . . . . We could have had it all. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Maisie did all of these things in her radio show that ran concurrently with the later films, but we’re not a vintage radio comedy website, and although I can foresee myself occasionally checking in on the audio adventures of our heroine if I start to feel the need for a little Maisie in my life, I’m not about to dive headlong into that rabbit hole. 

We open in classic Maisie fashion; she’s got a job offer somewhere distant and needs to make her way there. For Undercover Maisie, this means that we find our heroine in Los Angeles trying to make her way back to New York, where she has an offer for a job as a bubble bath demonstrator (as she says, it’s good, clean work). She meets a seemingly kindly elderly woman who needs a travel companion for the long drive, and she convinces Maisie to use the specially installed glove compartment mini-safe to hide her valuables, then ditches Maisie when she goes into the gas station to get road snacks. Just as an innocent and delighted Maisie notes that they won’t be seeing any men for a while so she can get onions on her hamburgers, the woman drives off. We then cut to Maisie giving her statement to “bunco” detective Paul Scott (Barry Nelson), who investigates con artists and schemes, and he’s so impressed by Maisie’s photographic memory and perfect recall that he pressures the chief of police into hiring her as an undercover officer. Maisie goes through an accelerated police academy course in montage, but when she goes to the gym to learn self-defense, most of the other trainees (and the trainer) find her gorgeous presence so distracting that she’s assigned to do her hand-to-hand training one-on-one with Chip Dolan (Mark Daniels), a bunco cop whom Scott previously busted down for a past failure that’s never quite clear. 

There’s not quite a love triangle here, but the tension is strong. Dolan has no real designs on Maisie; she simply sympathizes with him in a way that Scott responds to jealously, especially when she asks Scott to give Dolan another chance. Scott, for his part, is too by-the-book for his own good, and overly devoted to his job. On the night that Maisie passes her civil service exam, Scott wants to put her right to work, but Dolan convinces the chief to let Maisie have one night to relax and celebrate. Scott turns up at her apartment later and invites her out for a night on the town, but it turns out that this was a cover to catch a pickpocket at a night club, and Maisie’s rightfully peeved at the deception. Scott slowly softens toward Maisie, and toward Dolan too, and gets the other man his job back. 

For Maisie’s first official assignment, she goes to see a fortune teller named Amor (Leon Ames), who channels her character’s dead fiancé and mother to tell her that she will soon meet someone who will present her with a foolproof investment opportunity. Later that day, she “coincidentally” meets Gilfred Rogers, a real estate broker. A trap is laid for the con artists, but when she crouches down, she accidentally reveals her slip, which has her name embroidered on it. Rogers, deducing the deception, congratulates Maisie for passing her final test, claiming to be a fellow law enforcement officer who was secretly confirming her readiness for undercover work. He and his accomplices slip away, and Maisie is embarrassed, determining that she has to catch them herself to make up for her failure. She finds a scrap of evidence that leads to a function where the con artist group is planning to scam a large number of G.I.s out of the funds they were given to build homes, but before she can do anything about it, the trio of con artists binds and gags her. “Amor” is a thief, but not a murderer, and he plans to merely keep her captive until the checks they’ve acquired clear, then they’ll leave her somewhere that the police will find her and be on their merry way. Co-conspirator Mrs. Canford (Gloria Holden, aka Dracula’s Daughter) convinces her husband that there’s no way that they can let Maisie go alive, which leads to some pretty high stakes. 

The film’s biggest weakness is that it feels like it’s aping Harry Beaumont’s previous outing, Maisie Goes to Reno, a little too closely. Maisie is once again held against her will by two men and a woman, the latter of whom slaps her across the face in a moment of fury. What differentiates it is that “Amor” is a much more interesting character than the leader of the conspirators in Nevada. Maisie is also more physically capable this time around; when she’s slapped, she immediately uses some of her self-defense techniques, only failing because she’s outnumbered. Maisie is a character whose comedy is usually verbal or situational; she’s quick with a retort or witticism, or the humor comes from her failing to fit in socially, as in Maisie Was a Lady and Up Goes Maisie. Here, she gets to do some good physical work, although the film’s attempts to hide Maisie’s more broad-shouldered and muscular stunt double are about as effectively convincing as the miniature helicopter flying around Pasadena last time. We do get to see Maisie keep her wits about her, though, as she finds ways to sneak messages out during her captivity and even leaves a clue about where she’s being taken on a road sign by leaving behind the same trademark undergarment that gave her away to the con artists earlier. The film hits its most exciting point with only two minutes of runtime left, as Mrs. Canford and her husband march Maisie off into the brush on the side of the road to shoot her. Maisie pretends to fall, gathering a handful of sand, and uses it Dale Gribble style to get the drop on her captors. She takes a rolling tumble over the brow of a hill with Canford, and she spends the last 45 seconds of the movie judo flipping both of the Canfords, which was a step down from Maisie flying around, but was nonetheless very cute and fun. 

And that’s where we leave Maisie. She’s engaged (again), seemingly ready to settle down, but we’ll never really know. The character may have been getting a little long in the tooth (when an APB is put out for the missing Officer Ravier, she’s described as being 25; Ann Sothern was nearly 40), but I believe that Maisie could have carried on. At the very least, she’ll always be where we left her: ready to start a new adventure, once again rolling her boulder up a hill, ready to change the lives of everyone she meets. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shakedown (1988)

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Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.

Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.

Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.

-Brandon Ledet

Exiled: A Law & Order Movie (1998)

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As I’ve previously mentioned in recent reviews of The Night of the Juggler, Highest 2 Lowest, and every podcast topic I can shoehorn it into, I’ve been watching a lot of Law & Order lately. I had never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural before this summer, and I’m now roughly 200 episodes deep into its original run, both facts to my shame. Part of the attraction in early seasons of the show is how pristine their current HD scans look on Hulu, especially in the initial stretch where most episodes were shot by all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. Now that I’m halfway into the ninth season, that attention to visual craft has mostly faded, and I’m more addicted to the storytelling format than I am impressed by the imagery. So it goes. However, I have recently found, hidden in those Hulu uploads, a made-for-TV Law & Order movie that aired in November of 1998 and makes a conscious effort to return to the cinematic slickness of the show’s early style. The only problem with Exiled: A Law & Order Movie, really, is that it’s all law and no order, deviating from the show’s bifurcated format to only focus on the police work that leads to a suspect’s arrest, skipping over the courtroom litigation that follows. That choice undercuts the set-up, punchline rhythms that make the show so routinely satisfying, but I suppose movies have a lot more leeway to leave an audience hanging. As someone currently invested in the show’s season-to-season quality shifts, it was an illustrative reminder of how much the show has changed over its first decade on air, dialing the clock back to where it started in 1990. I can’t imagine it’s especially useful to anyone who’s not currently nursing a Law & Order addiction, though, since it just barely works as a by-the-numbers cop thriller without its connection to the show.

Exiled is first & foremost a vanity parade for actor (and credibly alleged sexual abuser) Chris Noth, likely intended to capitalize on his then-recent premiere as Mr. Big on the hit HBO Show Sex and the City. Noth even gets a partial “Story By” credit, indicating that he got to shape how his original-cast Law & Order character, Detective Mike Logan, would return for his two-hour victory lap. For those who haven’t seen or thought about Detective Mike Logan since the 1990s, I will remind you that his character left the show in disgrace after punching a homophobic politician in front of TV news cameras, finally letting his hothead temperament get away from him in front of the wrong people. The “exile” of the title refers to his reassignment after that incident, having been shipped off to work domestic calls on Staten Island instead of homicide cases in Manhattan. At the start of the movie, he recovers a drowned corpse in the bay between his old life and his new one, shrewdly deciding to angle for his old job back by claiming jurisdiction over a homicide that clearly belongs to the other side. From there, Logan immediately returns to his old ways. He whores around Manhattan, shamelessly hitting on both the victim’s twin sister and his new partner, while interrogating suspects in his old favorite strip joints up & down 42nd Street (the kind that only exist on broadcast television, where strippers conspicuously dance in their bras & panties instead of fully nude). Like all “very special episodes” of Law & Order, the investigation inevitably leads to the mafia and a major corruption scandal, except now the TV-movie budget can afford a couple car chases & shootouts that the show never splurges on. Because Logan isn’t slated to return to the main cast of the show (as he quickly becomes busy tormenting Carrie Bradshaw elsewhere in the city), the movie then has to return him to where he starts in this story: an ambitious hothead loser with a barely manageable sex addiction, eternally imprisoned on Staten Island. It digs him back up just to bury him all over again.

Exiled is most interesting as an outlier curio for longtime Law & Order fans, an extended side-quest episode packed with trivial tidbits. It’s the only entry in the Law & Order canon I can name that doesn’t feature the iconic theme song or gavel-bang sound effects. Dana Ekleson’s casting as Logan’s Staten Island partner marks the first female detective in the show’s main cast. Ice-T also makes his first appearance  here, although in this instance he’s playing a pimp named Kingston, not his detective character from Law & Order: SVU. It’s also the last time Mike Logan appears in the main cast of the flagship show, only returning later in recurring cameos on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Speaking of its infinite spin-off series, 1998 was the very last year that Law & Order remained a singular, standalone show and not a franchise brand. To that end, Noth’s return to the series here is a naked effort to tie together all the loose threads of the original show’s casts before they fray beyond repair. Hilariously, that move makes the movie double as both a vanity project for Noth and also a tearful goodbye to John Forie’s background player Detective Tony Profaci, who hangs around the first eight seasons of the show doing nothing in particular except handing reports to the characters who matter. If the name “Profaci” means nothing to you, then there’s nothing to see here, but I found it amusing to see him get the Main Player treatment in Exiled while fan favorites Jerry Orbach & Sam Waterston are relegated to his usual background role. Also, Dabney Coleman fills in the Special Guest Star slot to maintain some continuity in the show’s usual format, even if the courtroom drama half is skipped entirely. Exiled is a snapshot of where the Law & Order of old (1990) intersects with the Law & Order of “now” (1998), captured just before the show mutated into a new, unmanageable beast. Now that this is out of my system, I will do my best not to clutter up this movie blog with too many more dispatches from my series watch-through in the second half of the show’s run, but I can’t make any promises. I’m already in too deep.

-Brandon Ledet

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

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I had a very difficult time getting anyone interested enough in the new Naked Gun to go see it with me, so much so that Brandon beat me to the punch with his review of it. Suffice it to say, we are in agreement that it’s a delight. And man, Elon Musk sure is catching strays out there in theaters this year, isn’t he? Between very thinly veiled versions of him appearing as villains in The Naked Gun, M3GAN 2.0, Superman, Mountainhead, and LifeHack, and a stand-in for him realizing that his whole life has been wasted and he’s likely hellbound in The Phoenician Scheme, this really hasn’t been a good year for him, has it? I doubt we’re going to Hollywood Carol him into turning his life around, but it sure is nice to see him getting egg on his face. But let’s return to a simpler time, when a movie’s evil villain didn’t have to be the richest man in the world, and when simply being a high-level drug trafficker with designs on killing Queen Elizabeth II was enough. 

Lt. Frank Derbin (Leslie Nielsen) of LAPD’s special unit called Police Squad has just returned from a vacation overseas, where he had a bit of a busman’s holiday in the form of busting up a conference of the United States’ then-greatest enemies, including Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Mikhail Gorbachev (whose famous birthmark Derbin reveals to be a fake). Upon returning home, he learns that his girlfriend has left him and his partner, Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), is in the hospital after attempting to bust a heroin operation aboard a ship in L.A. Harbor, where he was caught and shot by men who work for shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Nordberg’s wife begs Drebin to find the men responsible, but heroin found on Nordberg’s jacket points to him having been on the take; Drebin is given only 24 hours by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) to clear Nordberg’s name, as Police Squad has been authorized by Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand, aka Livia Soprano) to take charge of security operations for the impending visit of Liz II. Meanwhile, Ludwig instructs his unsuspecting secretary, Jane (Priscilla Presley), to get close to Drebin and learn what he knows under the guise of wanting to purge his company of any potential illegal activities. Jane and Frank immediately fall in love, but can he stop Ludwig’s plan to assassinate the queen, clear Nordberg’s name, and butcher the national anthem in 85 minutes? I mean 24 hours? 

I have pretty strong memories of watching The Naked Gun as a kid, but I think that I probably saw the film’s first sequel more often, given that it was likely cheaper to license for television. At the very least, very few of these gags were familiar to me (other than the scene in which Derbin accidentally drops Ludwig’s pen into a fish tank and ends up killing one of the prized tropical fish in the process of fishing it out). I think part of that might have been that child-me would have been a little bored by the film’s ending, as it spends a pretty long time at a baseball stadium, and as a reluctant little league player during the wave of Angels in the Outfield, Field of Dreams, Little Big League, and countless other family baseball movies, I would have tuned out. In fact, as much as I was enjoying this movie, the back half is largely eaten up by Frank attempting to stop an assassination attempt at Anaheim Stadium, and I started to feel my opinion of it waver. Luckily, the location allows for a lot of beats in which Nielsen gets to do something hilarious, which made up for the fact that the film parks itself there for so long. One of the best bits involves Frank faking his way onto the field by knocking out and taking the place of a famed international opera singer, which leads to him ending up on the mound, “singing” a half-remembered version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a delight, as is all of the stadium nonsense during which the queen is subjected to the vagaries of a baseball game, like having to ask someone to get out of your seat or ingest “dugout dogs” (one of which Ludwig discovers, to his horror, contains the remains of one of his lackeys who fell into the vat while trying to kill Frank). 

Humor is subjective, and one of the difficult things about reviewing it, as we’ve said before, is that the issue with a lot of discussions of comedy is that they can often simply devolve into recapping the jokes or reciting the dialogue. What I will say about the friend that I was finally able to convince to go see the new Liam Neeson Naked Gun was that he was glad I talked him into it, and that although he didn’t enjoy the sight gags as much as I did, he found the dialogue very funny, and I think that’s a testament to what works about Naked Gun conceptually. I love all of the visual puns and the playing around with the language of film (there’s a particularly funny bit where the camera pans from one room to another, with most of the characters going through the set door while Frank merely steps around the edge of the set wall), but even if that’s not something that you’re going to enjoy as much as I did, you’ll probably still get a kick out of the cleverness of the dialogue. I’d still say that this one ranks below my personal favorite spoof flick, Top Secret!, but that’s a high bar to clear, and I’ll admit that it’s not without its flaws—in particular, that it spends several minutes doing a direct parody of The Blue Lagoon rather than the genre tropes that it traffics in for most of the runtime is arguably worse than the baseball digression that happens in Naked Gun. 

It’s also interesting to look back at this one and see how much the most recent film drew from it without needing an audience to be familiar with its specifics. There is, of course, the scene in which two characters’ innocent misadventures are mistaken for degeneracy by an observer, Frank’s horny clunkily inelegant internal monologue upon meeting his love interest, and the scenes in which Frank gets raked over the coals by his superior. More specifically, when John Huston was explaining his master plan to his cronies in this year’s sequel, I said aloud, to my companion, “Isn’t this the exact plot of Kingsman?” (It is.) But the “use technology to brainwash people into committing acts of violence” villain plan is actually taken directly from the original, albeit on a much larger scale. In this film, Ludwig is able to use a remote device to turn people into Manchurian assassins; it’s never explained in any detail, as we just get close-ups of the sleeper agents’ watches when he pushes the button, and that’s all that we need to know. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. 

If you’re feeling a little nostalgic for an old school Naked Gun experience after seeing the new one, or need something to tide you over until you get the chance to check it out yourself, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Unusually for a comedy of its age, very few of the jokes have aged poorly, especially in comparison to some of “racial” comedy in the Hot Shots! movies; it’s possible that the film’s opening could come across as offensive if one wasn’t aware that the characters at the conference are specific world leaders/figures of the time, but that can’t be helped. If anything, the only thing that really dates this is the presence of the late (“alleged”) killer O.J. Simpson, but he’s not given much to do in this one other than be injured over and over again. That’s got to be worth it to somebody, right? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Naked Gun (2025)

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It’s generally bad practice to review a movie’s cultural context (or, worse, its tabloid press) instead of reviewing the movie itself, but I cannot resist the bait this time. The new genre-spoof legacyquel The Naked Gun is review-proof in the way most absurdly silly comedies are. Its plot, construction, and themes are all secondary to its efficiency in telling jokes, which are better experienced onscreen than in text. As a joke-delivery system, The Naked Gun may not hit the same rapid-fire rhythm as previous Police Squad! movies from the 80s & 90s, but it does hit the same success rate as previous Lonely Island-brand movies from director Akiva Shaffer (Popstar, Hot Rod); it’s very funny from start to end. The most surprising & rewarding aspect of the movie has occurred offscreen, however, playing out in the tabloid headlines of grocery store checkout lines. Regardless of whether you’ve seen the film, you’re likely already aware of the unexpected real-life romance that’s developing between its two stars, whom I can say with full confidence we are all rooting for. It was top of my mind watching the movie opening weekend, anyway, to the point where it was actively informing & enhancing the text instead of distracting from it. There is something innocently, infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s tabloid flirtations that makes this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise – so much so that my everyday happiness is now directly tied to their still-developing romance. It’s already a generous enough gift that the new power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85-minute comedy with my friends, but now I desperately need them to stay together until one of the three of us dies. They have made me their snowman.

If the significance of being Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s snowman is lost on you, it’s because you have not yet seen The Naked Gun. I am citing the kind of absurdist, for-its-own-sake gag that can only be referenced through the vaguest terms without spoiling what makes it funny. The highest compliment I can pay to The Naked Gun is to report that it is tightly packed with those snowman gags, each of which had me laughing myself breathless in public: the owl dad, the heat-vision dog, the jazz club scat, the bodycam chili dogs, and so on. There is no shortage of deliriously silly nonsense. Of course, it gets away with indulging in that goofball free-for-all because it’s working within a familiar structure that doesn’t require set-up or explanation. Shaffer’s The Naked Gun continues the same detective-story spoofery as the ZAZ-era Naked Gun films, dusted off with a few updated cultural references. Liam Neeson stars as Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the deadpan dolt police detective Frank Drebin played by Leslie Neilson in the original series. In fact, Drebin’s entire LAPD station is staffed by the sons of former Police Squad! characters, allowing for metatextual jabs at both the film’s own preposterous participation in the legacyquel format and the real-life legacy of former Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson. Neeson’s casting is smart beyond his name’s homophonic resemblance to Neilson’s. He’s similarly self-serious as an onscreen persona, having now starred in almost two solid decades of post-Taken thrillers worthy of goofy self-parody. He plays Frank Drebin, Jr. with the straightest face he can manage, which makes all of his overly literal, Amelia Bedelia misunderstandings of basic figures of speech consistently funny. The investigation in this specific episode also deals with a megalomaniac tech-bro Elon Musk stand-in (Danny Huston) to help bring the Naked Gun format up to date, and there are specific parodic references to recent thriller titles like Mission: Impossible – Fallout that do the rest of that work. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a modern-day Naked Gun movie, except with a few self-contained, sketch-comedy deviations specific to its director’s Lonely Island pedigree.

What I did not expect from a modern-day Naked Gun was to be emotionally moved by its central romance. Filling the role of previous series love interest Priscilla Presley, Pamela Anderson co-stars as Neeson’s buxom femme fatale Beth Davenport. An author of “true crime” novels based on stories that she “makes up” herself, Davenport becomes overly involved in the investigation of her software-engineer brother’s death, teaming up with Drebin to take down the Musky supervillain who killed him. After an initial noir-trope meeting in the Venetian-blinds shadows of Drebin’s office, the unlikely pair are caught off-guard by how immediately, intensely attracted they are to each other, which is impossible to fully differentiate from Neeson & Anderson’s publicity-cycle romance. Many of the broader noir tropes spoofed here ring true to their real-life relationship, especially when Drebin laments that he wakes up every day in his “lonely cop apartment” mourning his “dead cop wife,” echoing Neeson’s recent public perception as a perpetually grieving widower. Likewise, Davenport’s eagerness to get in on the action of the Police Squad investigation as a true-crime junkie recalls Anderson’s struggle to earn her way back onto the big screen after Hollywood discarded her as leftover 90s eye candy. I was happy to see her shine in a role worthy of her recent late-career makeover after that Delicate Betty Boop magnetism was wasted by last year’s Awards Season dud The Last Showgirl. I was also relieved to see Neeson back in the tabloids for something that wasn’t sexually objectifying or bizarrely racist. More so that I can ever remember, I am genuinely happy for this millionaire celebrity couple and emotionally invested in their long-term success. As for The Naked Gun, it’s difficult to guess what its own long-term success might be. It’s neither as densely packed with rewindable background visual gags as the original Naked Gun series nor as instantly rewatchable as the sing-along music video sketches of Shaffer’s Popstar, but it’s still dependably funny and—for at least as long as its real-life love affair lasts—romantically sweet.

-Brandon Ledet

Eddington (2025)

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I remember when the first reviews of Beau is Afraid were coming out, one of the earliest reports were of someone who stood up as the credits rolled and shouted, “I better not hear any fucking clapping!” I saw that movie by myself on a Saturday morning because I love a pre-noon matinee, but this time, I went to see Eddington with a group of friends. One friend left the theater for two extended periods of time, and I assumed that they weren’t feeling well until, standing outside after the 145-minute runtime had come to its conclusion, they expressed righteous indignation over the movie’s pace and momentum. Another friend stated that they also felt the film was overlong, especially its final act, and said he would rank it 3.5 stars. I was a little too tired to get into it that night, but I thought this one was great. It’s not as exceptional as Ari Aster’s previous work, but it’s just as confident and feels like a return to his more conceptually focused first couple of films. 

The film opens in May of 2020, and we learn a lot about Eddington, New Mexico fairly quickly. As the town’s resident vagrant (an unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) approaches from the desert, we see that it’s not very large, maybe sixteen square blocks, and we learn later that a lot of what we do see is unoccupied. Just outside of town is the potential site for a new AI data center, the construction of which (and the accompanying “job creation”) are a center of the platform for Eddington mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is up for re-election. Garcia has followed gubernatorial guidelines for masking and social distancing, which has escalated what are likely long-term frictions between Garcia and Eddington’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), whose asthma makes him overly inclined to side with the “I can’t breathe with a mask” contingent. Cross’s home life is a nightmare; his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has moved into the home he shares with his wife Louise (Emma Stone), a temporary situation that has become extended, and which is further exacerbated by Dawn’s ceaseless, breathless repetition of too-online conspiracy ideas and justifications. There’s a shrine to Dawn’s late husband and Louise’s father, Joe’s predecessor as sheriff, in their already-cramped house, and Louise is clearly starting to be affected by the omnipresence of Q-addled discourse being broadcast in her home 24/7. She also makes creepy, Tim Burton-esque dolls that she sells on Etsy, unaware that all of her sales are coming from people that Joe pays back. Garcia’s house is a little more peaceful, as he parents his son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) solo while also running the town and a local bar. Without thinking it through or talking it over with his wife, he declares his own candidacy for mayor in the upcoming election, and he sets out to dethrone Garcia. 

This is not a stylish movie in the way that Beau or Midsommar were. It’s grounded, and for some, it may be too grounded. My frustrated friend grew very bored very quickly of how much of the film was taken up with people looking at their phones, which I think means that the film effectively captured the perpetual boredom (intercut with moments of intense existential dread) that came from the unfettered screentime that characterized the time period in which it’s set. Like a lot of real life conflict, many find themselves unable to invest in a film in which there are no characters to sympathize with or root for. Garcia is more than willing to sell out Eddington’s future by ensuring that the town will be rendered uninhabitable within a few decades—optimistically—by allowing its resources to be consumed by the data center, over the objections of the only person living in town who voices any dissent about what the project will mean to the town’s future. Later scenes set in his home also reveal him to be one of those toilet paper hoarders, which is a clever bit of visual storytelling in that it shows us that, for all his outward appearances of being progressive and compassionate, he’s susceptible to (and buys into) the same base panicky animal instincts shared by others. It would have been perhaps too pat a narrative if this selfishness in combination with his carelessness about the community and its environmental needs was compared to his acquiescence to COVID mandates put in place for the common good, and to have that realization of his hypocrisy be the catalyst for Joe’s mayoral campaign. Of course, that would also cause us to lend too much sympathy to Joe, and it’s important that we never think too highly of him or consider that any actions he takes could be reasonable on any level. Joe has to be detestable despite any sympathy that we may have for him as a result of what he’s dealing with at home; it’s imperative that he have no real ideals or ideology because the moment we can trace his violent impulses and their fallout to an internal ethical construction, we run into the danger of potentially empathizing with him. 

Every Aster protagonist prior to Joe is someone with whom we empathize, in part because their behavior stems from traumas that are completely external. In Hereditary, Toni Collette’s Annie has been driven to the point of madness by a lifetime of being gaslit by her cultist mother and the death of her daughter, so while her downfall is inevitable, it’s also relatable and understandable. In Midsommar, Florence Pugh’s Dani can come across as needy and difficult, but she’s dealing with the reality of her family’s tragic, horrifying death and the unspoken-but-not-unknown reality that her boyfriend is staying with her out of pity rather than compassion, duty rather than love. The title character in Beau is Afraid is impotent and pathetic, but his entire life is an endless nightmare constructed and architected by his mother in order to make him that way. Joe’s tragic flaw is entirely a matter of his pride. To the extent that his actions are affected by external circumstances, his acting out could be traced to the pandemic, but he’s not alone in dealing with that; literally everyone on Earth is dealing with the same problem. Beau’s world is designed to isolate and emotionally destroy him in a kind of actualization of the paranoid idea that “The world is out to get you,” while Joe is reacting to the events of very real time and place that we all experienced, but he (like many psychopathically individualistic people at that time) falls into the same paranoid trap. Beau was right; the world was out to get him. Joe, on the other hand, is very, very wrong. There’s not a single thing that Joe touches that isn’t worse for having come into contact with him, and every action that he takes results in making Eddington worse, less safe, and more fractured, and the events that spill out of Eddington into the rest of the world (notably the escalation of a Kyle Rittenhouse-esque figure to the national stage) also make everything worse. There’s no one to root for here, and that in combination with the laser-focus on a shaky, unsteady period of recent history makes for a movie that’s bound to alienate audiences despite its verisimilitude in comparison to the more surreal films in Aster’s C.V. I’ve loved all of his movies, but just as much as I wouldn’t blame someone for not enjoying Midsommar or Beau, I wouldn’t argue with someone who hated this movie because this is not a movie that’s meant to please. It’s doing something else. 

Not to keep putting this movie in conversation with all of Aster’s other work, but each of his movies have been about people on the verge, dealing with madness that works its way out of them. In this film, the madness is in everyone. Louise is a particularly pitiable figure, trapped in a place that she hates and surrounded by reminders of the past. Her father was sheriff before Joe, and her mother’s reverence for him seems to be a point of contention, with implication that he was abusive and that this abuse left Louise open to manipulation by Q-esque radical Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak is a curious figure here, as he had little real effect on the plot or on Eddington. Dawn, deep into her conspiracy rabbit hole, takes Louise to one of Peak’s meetings, where his improbable tale of childhood trafficking (which bears all the markings of false memory syndrome, if Peak even believes what he’s saying at all and isn’t merely being used to generate a cult of personality around himself) moves Louise to abandon her family and join him. Narratively, he simply removes Louise from the story, but on a more holistic level, he epitomizes the kinds of dangerous grifters who can emerge from times of social upheaval, and a demonstration of just how far-reaching their influence can be due to the rise of social media and larger communication infrastructure. He’s there for the same reason that goofy Sarah, the wannabe social justice influencer is: because Eddington is trying (and mostly succeeding) to create a panoramic externalization of the general American circumstances of 2020. And it works! For me, at least. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

All Light, Everywhere (2021)

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It’s been a popular meme among online movie-nerds in recent years to declare “All movies are bad” in self-deprecating irony.  The latest experimental essay from Theo “Rat Film” Anthony actually makes a sincere case for that exact sentiment, damning its own medium as a tool of police & military violence since the moment of its invention.  All Light, Everywhere broadly details the weaponization of motion picture recordings in our racist surveillance state, but it extends that critique to the very first examples of motion pictures, underlining that “All movies are bad” – at least on a moral, political level.  It’s one of those philosophical nightmares that makes you bitter about being born on this miserable hell planet (or at least makes the cinephile in you want to find a new hobby).  It’s also a great movie, even if it is anti-movie.

It doesn’t take much effort for All Light, Everywhere to make a modern audience feel sickened & infuriated by police bodycam tech.  The breezy, self-protective training that cops receive when equipped with bodycams and the smug self-satisfaction of the tech’s biggest manufacturer Axios advertising their wares is difficult to stomach.  Memories of Black citizens murdered by the police state without consequence for the cops who pulled the trigger—thanks to the intentional limitations & biases of surveillance tech—lurk just outside the frame, souring every chipper onscreen boast about its profitability and illusion of accountability.  Anthony even threads those memories into his larger thematic preoccupations with his home city of Baltimore by citing the murder of Freddie Gray as a specific example of bodycams protecting cops instead of citizens.  It’s all emotionally raw, morally corrupt, and worthy of documentation.

Where All Light, Everywhere excels is in connecting that modern weaponization of the motion picture camera back to its earliest uses & abuses.  Early movie cameras were typified by designs like “the photographic rifle” and “the photographic revolver,” leaving behind a language where cameras still “shoot” their subjects.  There’s a hypothetical version of this movie to be made where each new development in motion picture tech was used to further the art & distribution of pornography, but instead Anthony focuses on how they were used to afford the illusion of unbiased automation to morally bankrupt police & military systems.  Police body cameras are just the next logical evolution in a long history of supposedly “objective” motion picture recordings reinforcing the biases of the inherently violent political institutions behind them.

If you’ve seen Rat Film, you know that Anthony does not lay out this political history of the weaponized movie camera in a linear, easily digestible argument.  Instead, scientific explanations of the camera’s “blind spots”, the philosophy of its place in modern culture, its effect on human perception of the world, and the racial politics of Baltimore as a microcosm of the US at large are all loosely mixed in an open-ended visual essay that’s heavier on atmospheric dread than it is on declarative statements.  Still, the movie leaves you disgusted with the motion picture as a medium, no matter how open its arguments are left for interpretation or how much Anthony strives to leave on a moment of hope in the epilogue.  It turns out all movies really are bad.  Bummer.

-Brandon Ledet

Kathryn Bigelow and the Tough-as-Nails Heroine

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One of the more popular theories as to why Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director is that she almost exclusively makes movie about men & masculinity. That’s not to say she doesn’t have an active, genuine interest in the topic as auteur, but rather that it’s curious that the filmmaker fixated on telling men’s stories happens to be the one woman director to ever win her field’s top prize. Bigelow’s preoccupation with macho, dirtbag men is especially noticeable in our current Movie of the Month—the Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days—in which a scumbag anti-hero played by Ralph Fiennes is inexplicably centered in the film’s narrative instead of the more traditionally heroic badass played by Angela Bassett. Bassett’s stunt-driving, punches-throwing, testicles-kicking, politically radical heroine is a true wonder—a spectacle in herself—which makes it all the more tragic that even she is helpless to Fiennes’s greasy macho charms in the main role. That letdown is an intentionally frustrating aspect of the script (which Bigelow penned with her creative partner and already then-former husband James Cameron), but it still left me wondering what the film might have played like if Bigelow were more interested in Basset’s inner life and instead centered the woman as the lead. It would at least have been a novel departure from her usual mode.

As far as I can tell, Bigelow’s 1990 cop thriller Blue Steel is her only feature film to date with a woman in the top-billed role. Jamie Lee Curtis stars a rookie NYC police officer with a violent streak that immediately lands her in hot water. She’s not exactly the tough-as-nails badass Bassett portrays in Strange Days, but that archetype is exactly what she aspires to be. When pressed by her male colleagues about why she wants to be a cop in the first place, she “jokes” about coveting the violent authoritarianism of the position, musing “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to shoot people.” The truth turns out to be more that she grew up powerless to stop her abusive father from physically assaulting her mother, and her new badge & gun armory allows her to wield power over him and other abusers. The first time she dons her blue uniform, she struts down the street with newfound, first-in-her-lifetime confidence. During her first night on the job she overreacts to the threats of an armed suspect and unloads every bullet she’s got into his chest. She just as capable of violence as Bassett’s tough-as-nails heroine, but lacks that role model’s cool, even hand and moral sense of justice. It’s a dangerous inner conflict that the film eventually likens to the sociopathic impulses of a deranged serial killer – a man. Naturally, this wouldn’t be a Bigelow film if there wasn’t some destructive, alluring force of masculinity present to steer the central conflict.

Blue Steel’s grotesquely macho villain subverts Jamie Lee Curtis’s hero status at the film’s center by realigning her with the Final Girl archetypes that first made her famous. Ron Silver costars as a dangerously narcissistic Wall Street brute turned serial killer, essentially laying out the entire American Psycho template in an underpraised stunner of a role. This mustache-twirling villain is first inspired to kill when he witnesses Curtis decimate her perp on her first night of patrol. His fetishistic obsession with her (and her gun) quickly escalates into erotic thriller territory, a tension he relieves by shooting randomly selected victims on the NYC streets. He also shoehorns his way into the rookie cop’s romantic life with his Wall Street wealth, so that she’s unknowingly dating the very killer she’s professionally hunting. While the film is willing to link the trigger-happy cop’s penchant for violence with the Wall Street creep’s own sociopathy, this largely becomes a tale of a woman who’s boxed in on all sides by macho bullies. Between her abusive father, her gaslighting boyfriend, and the police force higher-ups who do not believe her accounts of being attacked by creeps on the street, Blue Steel’s heroine is awash in a flood of insidious machismo. For at least this one film, Bigelow proves that she can center a woman protagonist’s story why still satisfying her auteurist preoccupations with the nature & textures of masculinity. In that way, Blue Steel deserves to be regarded as one of the director’s foremost texts.

There are plenty of other reasons why Blue Steel deserves higher critical prominence in the Bigelow canon that have nothing to do with its tough-as-nails heroine. From the harsh noir lighting to the ice-cold atmospheric score & eroticized gun violence, this deeply creepy, mean thriller finds Bigelow at one of her most stylistically indulgent moments as a director. She’s channeling some serious 80s Friedkin vibes here, which I mean as a high compliment; all that’s missing is an elaborate chase scene & a Wang Chung soundtrack. Still, the most readily recognizable significance of the film within the director’s larger catalog is the rare chance to see her center a woman protagonist while remaining true to the violence & masculinity of her typical milieu. It’s not exactly the hypothetical “What if Angela Bassett was Top-Billed in Strange Days?” scenario that genre nerd audiences are likely to hope for, but it is the closest Bigelow has ever gotten to satisfying that ideal. It’s also, notably, an exquisite chiller of a film in its own right.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days (1995), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and our look at the director’s continued fascination with police brutality in Detroit (2017).

-Brandon Ledet

Kathryn Bigelow and the Few Bad Apples

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For most of its sprawling, thematically dense runtime, Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days—our current Movie of the Month—is a politically daring, eerily prescient rebuke of the historically racist Los Angeles Police Department. As much as the film’s futuristic VR recording tech was predictive of the way police body cams & citizens’ cell phone footage would later change the way we publicly processed police brutality in the coming decades, it also served a snapshot of its then-current political angst. Strange Days plays like a big-budget blockbuster amplification of the racial police force pushback that led to the Rodney King riots, reinterpreting real-life civil unrest through a futuristic sci-fi lens. It’s a bizarre jolt of a letdown, then, when those citizens vs. police tensions are resolved in a last-minute turnaround where a police commissioner swoops in to admonish his corrupt, racist employees – simplifying the LAPD’s systemic racism to just a few rogue cops who don’t follow protocol. That same misinterpretation of racist policing in black neighborhoods would pop up again decades later, when Bigelow fixed her eye on a racist past instead of a racist future.

2017’s Detroit drew much more vocal criticism for its political shortsightedness than Strange Days suffered in the 90s, but that’s likely because more people happened to see it in the first place (not to mention the democratization of critical publication in a post-Twitter world). A brutal historical drama about the 1967 Detroit race riots, the film wasn’t exactly a crowd-pleasing box office smash, but Bigelow’s transformation from underappreciated genre film auteur to Oscar-winning establishment director means that every feature she releases in the modern era is something of an event. Like Strange Days, Detroit rushes out the gate throwing wild punches in a frenetic, meticulously detailed account of how one police raid of an unlicensed black nightclub spiraled out into a weeks-long, city-wide riot. The first hour of the film is an adrenaline-flooded nightmare as handheld war-style photography mixes with real-life news footage to paint the backdrop for the smaller, more confined story to follow in its second hour. It’s once the story slams the brakes to park at The Algiers Hotel in that second hour that the film draws a lot of its political backlash from critics – an unease with depictions of police brutality that was only exacerbated by the film being released the same week as the police-condoned racist mayhem of Charlottesville.

Once Detroit shifts from its macro view of how the 1967 riots ignited & spread to the specific, intimate terror of The Algiers Hotel, its interests shift from political unrest to militaristic torture. Convinced that a sniper in the hotel is shooting at the National Guards, a small band of police officers torture the business’s residents to “confess” who is guilty of the (non-existent) crime. The duration & methodical repetition of this sequence, in which several black men are murdered & psychologically tormented by white cops, drew a lot of criticism as torture porn that turned black pain & brutalized black bodies into mass entertainment. That lingering fixation on physical abuse & torture had been part of Bigelow’s visual language since her earliest features, an approach to storytelling that could only be described as “unflinching.” Whether that sensibility was worth continuing when she shifted into telling real-life black stories as a white artist is a conversation worth having, especially since Charlottesville was such a raw nerve when the film was first released. What really disappointed me about Detroit personally, though, was Bigelow’s continued reluctance to interrogate the racism of the offending police force as an institution rather than a defect among a few bad apples. She showed very little progress on that front in the 22 years between Strange Days & Detroit, if any at all.

In its superior opening hour, Detroit is actively interested in the institutional reinforcement of racial segregation & subjugation, which only makes its third-act backpedaling all the more frustrating. In a bewildering mixed-media collage of animation, real-life newsreel footage, and blood pressure-raising historical reenactments, Bigelow paints a wide picture of the systemic racial inequality that led to the civil unrest at the film’s core: the history of urban housing inequality and the cycle of white flight; the media coverage of the riots as senseless self-destruction rather than a purposeful expression of political discontent; the police force’s unwillingness to shoot looters dead, as they value property over black lives; etc. When we zero in on the extensive torture session at The Algiers, however, that critical eye towards institutionalized inequality becomes much murkier, to the point of being meaningless. Every commanding officer, National Guardsmen, and varying other police force higher-ups who catch wind of what the “rogue” cops did at The Algiers (entirely under the direction of a single bully, played by the eternally punchable Will Pourter) is disgusted by their actions. Although the real-life cops who committed these heinous acts were never fully held accountable, the movie makes sure it’s clear that they acted as a standalone gang of rotten apples. It makes no moves to interrogate how their evil acts may have been encouraged or even deliberately trained into them by their higher-ups. They’re portrayed as human flaws in the system, instead of the ugly truth that they’re a sign of the system working exactly as intended.

For me, Detroit is overall a mixed bag, but the in-the-moment effect of its intense opening hour is almost enough to carry it. There’s some truly impressive, ambitious craft on display from Bigelow before the film slams its brakes to dwell on militaristic torture tactics for a literal eternity. Strange Days is similarly upsetting in is own depictions of intimate brutality, but its bigger sci-fi ideas remain a work of sprawling ambition throughout, making for a wholly satisfying picture in its entirety. No matter how much my genre-nerd impulses allow me to overlook Strange Days’s political shortcomings, however, I can’t help but be disappointed to see Bigelow’s “a few bad apples” misinterpretation of systemic police brutality & racism continue all the way into the 2010s. It only makes the superior firm’s own backpedaling conclusion more of a letdown in retrospect.

For more on December’s Movie of the Month, the Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K sci-fi epic Strange Days, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet