L.A. Confidenial is a rare bird indeed: a modern American crime epic with great acting, a great script, great direction and a great look to boot. How many films these days can you say such a thing about these days? The old saying that 'they don't make them like they used to' can really be put to the test here.
Director Curtis Hanson is not the sort of filmmaker who would normally be associated with this sort of movie - best known for his escapist films such as The Hand That Rocked the Cradle and The River Wild (which costarred Confidential's David Strathairn), Hanson managed to get enough street cred to be able to risk making a film which could finally launch him to the Hollywood A-list.
A risk because L.A. Confidential doesn't have what one would consider bona fide movie stars, in the U.S., at least - Kevin Spacey, while being an Oscar winner and having a sizable cult following, has never proven that he can open a film; Russell Crowe, while an award-winning actor for his Australian films Proof and Romper Stomper (which managed to make headlines by creating controversy because of its racist characters), has had a Hollywood career which so far been less than successful; and Guy Pearce, the former soapy heartthrob who only came to international prominence with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and who seemed to be destined afterwards to a life of more Australian films (the gender-swapping comedy Dating the Enemy, for example) and television series (The Man From Snowy River).
Hanson, then, should definately be applauded for managing to overcome the obvious difficulties he would have had in securing such a risky cast and succeeding. Casting two little known, non-American actors in a major Hollywood picture is almost unheard of, but hopefully we'll be seeing more of it in the future after this film. "No stars, just talent," indeed.
Bud White (Crowe) is a firey young cop who acts before he thinks, beats up on men who beat up on women and is fiercely loyal to his comrades, especially when he's pressured into giving evidence to an inquiry when he and his partner Dick Strensland (Graham Beckel) are photographed beating into a group of Mexican prisoners suspected of assailing a couple of policemen.
White's polar opposite is Ed Exley (Pearce), a by-the-book college boy who doesn't mind creating a few enemies if it can further his career. After spilling the beans on the beating, he becomes a Detective Lieutenant and becomes second-in-command behind police captain Dudley Smith (the brilliant James Cromwell) in a murder investigation which runs far deeper than either he or White could imagine.
The entire cast (which also includes Danny De Vito, Kim Basinger and another former Australian soap star, Simon Baker Denny) are terrific, but special mention must of course go to Crowe, Pearce and Spacey (as Jack Vincennes, another cop who gets caught up in the investigation) for their exceptional performances.
Hanson proves that he is definately a force to be reckoned with as a director. He has made a modern classic with this film, one that can very admirably stand alongside the films from the 40s and 50s. See it.
5 stars.
Nigel Bridgeman (nigelb@powerup.com.au) The Movie Pages - a movie page: http://www.powerup.com.au/~nigelb/movies
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews