“Prince of the City” (1981)
Danny Ciello is a narc who will not rat on his partners. That’s because, for Danny, his partners are more like family, and to go against them would be to go against the very ethos that makes him who he is. “Prince of the City” is one of Sidney Lumet’s great works because it dives deep into the ethical dilemma of what it means for someone traditionally tasked with enforcing the law to call bullshit on a legal system that’s no longer fair or just. Lumet, to his credit, has no delusions about police work or what it involves. Danny and his fellow officers are portrayed as a scummy, scurrilous bunch, running amok across the drug-plagued expanse of Koch-era New York City. “All Cops Are Bastards” indeed. Lead actor Treat Williams goes for broke playing a man who is torn between his allegiance to his line of work, and his own animalistic instinct to stay alive. Like “On The Waterfront,” “Prince of the City” is an American classic about the moral cost of being a snitch, and the film’s devastating final frames drive that point home with exquisite precision and Lumet’s signature, fiery conviction. – NL
“Q&A” (1990)
Yes, we’re including three Sidney Lumet films on this list, only because the “Dog Day Afternoon” director is one of cinema’s most skilled chroniclers of police malfeasance. “Q&A” lacks the prestige of “Serpico” and the cult status of “Prince of the City,” but as a rough-hewn examination of the fundamental tribalism and inhumanity of police factions, it’s further evidence of Lumet’s status as one of the all-time great authors on this subject. “Q&A” depicts a criminal justice system that is terribly, irrefutably broken. Its world is one filled with racial invective and rampant immoral behavior. “Q&A” is also nimble in its handling of hot-button issues, including police shootings, the “self-defense” argument, and law enforcement’s longstanding, oft-unsteady alliance with organized crime. Casting Nick Nolte as lieutenant Mike Brennan was a stroke of genius: the great, grizzled actor refuses to dress up his portrait of this crass, hateful individual, who embodies the outmoded archetype of the tormented white lawman who blames the “Jew lawyers and guinea D.A.’s” for his problems. “Q&A” isn’t afraid to rub the audience’s faces in the unsavory side of policing, and as a result, the film has aged better than anyone could have anticipated. – NL
“Rampart” (2011)
“I am not a racist. Fact is, I hate all people equally.” So says LAPD misanthrope Dave Brown, who is played with rancorous ferocity by the normally mellower Woody Harrelson in “Rampart,” Oren Moverman’s spectacularly disorienting look at a poisonous, self-serving lawman living on the knife’s edge of his own sanity. The Rampart years were some of the most corrupt and contentious in the history of the LAPD, and all of that free-floating sleaze and venality finds an appropriate personification in Harrelson’s mentally unbalanced, proudly vile urban cowboy. Harrelson is a very earnest performer but there’s a chilling cynicism in his characterization here. Brown is a twenty-year-plus veteran of a law enforcement organization with a long history of terrorizing minority communities. He’s a man who sees the streets of Los Angeles as a lawless petri dish of scum and crime, one that only he is fit to patrol. While movies like “Patriot’s Day” and “End Of Watch” skew dangerously close to hero-worshipping copraganda in 2020, Moverman’s hard-hitting drama is an audacious deep-dive into the tattered mindscape of a baton-brandishing bully who makes local headlines for all the wrong reasons. – NL
“RoboCop” (1987)
Before superheroes monopolized mainstream action films, the genre experienced something of a golden age in the 1980s, usually as a response to fascism and the Ronald Reagan presidency. Perhaps no film captured the free market nightmare of the Reagan days better than Paul Verhoeven’s anti-capitalist takedown of American extremism, “RoboCop.” An ultraviolent dystopian satire that gleefully skewers the emerging religious fanaticism on the right and corporate nihilism of the ’80s, Verhoeven’s film is disturbingly timeless, and also unfathomable in this day and age. Using comic book iconography and dystopian sci-fi tropes to portray a futuristic Detroit in which police are privatized under the new ownership of a mega-corporation, Omni Consumer Products, Verhoeven winds up making the rare studio film that scathingly critiques consumerism, while maintaining its veneer as a bloody, consumer-friendly action film. To this day, “RoboCop” remains the Holy Grail of anti-cop cinema because it’s one of the few to actually take the whole system to task. Verhoeven, one of our great Hollywood disruptors, infiltrated the most masculine, conservative genre of its time and duped his unwitting audience into rooting for the downfall of American capitalism as we know it. –– MR
“Serpico” (1973)
Props to any cop who has the guts to put down their badge and department-administered firearm in the wake of this recent string of tragically unnecessary murders. This can’t be an easy thing to do, particularly since many police unions operate like the mob, where you stand by your partners at all costs. Real-life NYPD officer Frank Serpico, who blew the lid off a corruption scandal in the late ’70s, is the real-life inspiration behind “Serpico,” one of Sidney Lumet’s seminal works. As played by Al Pacino, Serpico sticks out like a sore thumb among his fellow officers. He’s got long hair and a hippie beard, and he refuses to conform to the hateful fraternity mentality of his cop colleagues. “Serpico” is that rare American crime drama that examines, with rigorous honesty, a world-within-a-world defined by its own set of rules. In this world, the cops need the city’s criminal element to keep thriving. Otherwise, most of them would be out of jobs, and might even be forced to commit criminal acts themselves. Such is the cruel cycle Lumet examines in his gritty ’70s masterpiece. – NL
“Training Day” (2001)
There may not be a more repellent movie cop in the history of cinema than Alonzo Harris, the demented and charismatic bully who exists at the center of Antoine Fuqua’s grimy L.A. actioner, “Training Day.” It’s true, King Kong doesn’t have shit on this guy. Alonzo is a character who only seems truly comfortable in the presence of evil. There’s no limit to his awfulness: he’ll screw over his partners, trick a rookie into smoking PCP, and exploit communities of color, all for his own twisted gain. Alonzo seems to regard evil as being as essential to his existence as oxygen. The magic trick of Denzel Washington’s performance is that he lets us see the toxic allure that Alonzo exudes without ever romanticizing the guy or sanding down his problematic edges. It’s a powerhouse performance, monstrous, magnetic, and often funny in the darkest possible way. We admit, “Training Day’s” view of Los Angeles as a crime-ridden, gangbanger-infested urban hellscape has not aged particularly well, but the film’s insights into why people choose to give cops a pass, even and especially when they’re accused of criminal, unforgivable behavior, are still potent today. – NL
“Triple 9” (2016)
Striking a balance between the nihilistic worldview of David Ayer and the beer belly bro’s of “Den of Thieves,” director John Hillcoat’s cops and robbers thriller “Triple 9” is a gripping look at the underbelly of a corrupt Atlanta police department. Bringing his gritty period sensibilities to a modern cop thriller, Hillcoat bridges a gap between the conservatively minded westerns of Hollywood’s past and the urban degradation of the contemporary Hollywood police drama, envisioning this renegade gang as cowboys in the Wild West. Armed with a stacked cast (Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Kate Winslet, Anthony Mackie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Aaron Paul among them) Hillcoat’s Atlanta-based actioner about a gang of corrupt-cops-turned-bank-robbers, might seem fairly boilerplate on the surface, but the film’s wicked sense of humor, well-staged set pieces and Lumet-esque moral complexity imbue the standard plot with a necessary jolt of unpredictability. It’s far from groundbreaking stuff, but it’s an entertaining thriller about unchecked power, featuring a batshit, go-for-broke turn from Harrelson that should have garnered much more attention. –– MR
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster,” in which Josh Brolin plays one of the most brazenly dishonest movie cops in recent memory. The inventive, small-scale thriller “Cop Car,” directed by “Spider-Man: Homecoming” director Jon Watts. “Den of Thieves,” in which Gerard Butler’s dick-swinging ex-jock of a cop proudly proclaims that the police “are like a gang.” “Gang Related,” which features Tupac Shakur and Jim Belushi as two pigs who pin the accidental murder of an undercover narc on a homeless alcoholic.
There’s also “Gone Baby Gone,” in which a Boston P.I. wades into some morally murky waters searching for a missing girl. Also, “Good Time,” in which the Safdie Brothers weave scathing commentary about how police incarcerate and mistreat the mentally ill into an anxious, pulse-quickening heist narrative.
Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” almost made the list purely off the strength of Ed Skrein’s portrait of one of the most reptilian bad cops in movie history, while David Ayer’s “Harsh Times” offers an unvarnished study of a disturbed white male psycho whose sick power fantasies and delusions of being a “protector” find an unfortunate outlet in his aspirations of joining the LAPD. George Tillman, Jr.’s “The Hate U Give” narrowly missed inclusion here, as did Neil LaBute’s racially inflammatory conversation-starter, “Lakeview Terrace.”
Kris Kristofferson is a mean, unsurprisingly racist Texas sheriff in John Sayles’ excellent “Lone Star,” although the film isn’t so concerned with the particulars of unjust policing that it would earn a spot on this list. 1968’s “Madigan” sees “Dirty Harry” director Don Siegel depicting a turbulent weekend in the life of two alarmingly reckless cops, plus the higher-ups who will stop at nothing to sweep their foot soldier’s dirt under the rug. “Maniac Cop” is an utterly insane anti-cop exploitation movie as only grindhouse maven William Lustig could have envisioned it, while the sobering “Monsters and Men” offers a sincerely urgent critique of the unchecked police violence that plagues ethnically diverse, working-class neighborhoods.
The law enforcement officials in “Point Break” are an appropriately rotten bunch, although Kathryn Bigelow’s SoCal classic is ultimately a heist movie that happens to feature surfer crooks squaring off against dirty cops. The fact that “Queen & Slim” pretty much opens with the death of a profiling police officer would ordinarily make us want to include it in the list proper; it’s just too bad screenwriter Lena Waithe felt compelled to introduce a phonily endearing, good-hearted cop character a few scenes later.
“Shakedown” features Peter Weller and Sam Elliott in a gripping yarn about a police misconduct scandal, while the underappreciated “Unlawful Entry” somehow manages to be both an enjoyably goofy ’90s stalker thriller, and also a cutting deconstruction of the “good cop” fallacy, which is embodied here with reptilian bravado by Ray Liotta. And while Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” is not a police corruption picture on its surface, it’s still a vividly-rendered crime drama that understands that it’s not only mobsters who take bribes and kickbacks. Thanks for reading, everyone. Hope you’re all staying safe out there… and remember, it’s DEFUND the police because reform simply is not enough. – NL