COP
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1988 Jeff Meyer
For my money, the actor who delivers more emotional punch to his films, no matter what problems the script has, is James Woods. True, he often plays roles where his character is on the edge (of lunacy, of society, of moral and ethical behavior), but he scintillates in such parts. His eyes get bright, he gets that sideways grin/leer, and he uses his voice like an electric carving knife, cutting into whoever he's talking to.
He does it again in COP, which almost (but not quite) makes it as an excellent film. Woods plays a hot-shot L.A. police detective, a real cowboy who literally loves his work. He's smart and intuitive and slick and very brash and socially a fair-to-middlin' creep; he's also so caught up in his work that his home life has gone to hell. Underneath it all is an obsession with "innocence" that is coming out as things begin to fall apart domestically, some concept that he sees in the faces of the female victims he comes across in his day-to-day work.
The film opens with Woods' character investigating a tip from a burglar about an apartment homicide; he finds the body of a young woman who has been gruesomely murdered hanging from the ceiling. As the film progresses, Woods becomes convinced that she is a victim of a serial murderer; however, he has no real evidence of this (much of his conviction comes from the look of "innocence" in the photos of the victims), and the department doesn't like the possibility -- serial killers indicate that they got away with it for months or years before the police noticed it.
So we are left for much of the film trying to figure out whether Woods is an obsessive, rather repugnant investigative genius, or whether he is off his nut and interpreting a single murder to be the latest in a long line of executions. It's a fascinating dilemma for the viewer, and Woods just equivocates back and forth between the two positions. An excellent performance, a balancing act that works like a charm, and it continues to keep Woods in my book of the five best character actors working in American film today.
The other actors are good, too, and the script deserves credit for not making anyone a stereotype, either good or bad. Well, almost everyone -- Charles Haid comes off very poorly as a Beverly Hills cycle cop, perhaps because I have a hard time not seeing him as Renko on Hill Street Blues. And the script has a good sense of the humorous, though it's often rather morbid. The burglar's monologue as the opening credits roll by, and Woods' evening story to his 6-year-old daughter, seeded with police terms like an official report, are quite funny, and liven the film up at points.
But now for the drawback of the film -- the ending. The last fifteen minutes show that the screenwriter, who had some very good moments through the early part of the film, really lost it in the end. It would be a pedestrian ending except for its abruptness (though it does leave Woods with a hell of a good line). No follow-up on the characters; it just left me hanging for more.
Its finale is too flawed for me to give the film a full thumbs-up, but the it's worth $2.50 - $3.00 for the first 1.5 hours. An economy hour choice...
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
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