Narc

NARC

Rating: C-

Check your gun, badge, and brain at the door.

See if you can spot the procedural mistake in the following scenario: Two cops bust into a warehouse without a search warrant. Without announcing they're police officers, they enthusiastically fire their weapons at anything that moves, in particular two men inside. After wounding one and merely beating up the other, they handcuff them back to back and proceed to pound them to a bloody pulp. Then they tear up the place until they find a cache of weapons, whereupon one cop draws his revolver and haphazardly fires it several times in the immediate vicinity of the suspects' heads. Then he pulls out a tape recorder and demands they confess to a murder.

Did you spot the mistake? That's right - it was your mistake for ever coming to see this movie.

I sometimes wonder how real cops react when they see a film like this. Presumably, they laugh their asses off. Writer/director Joe Carnahan spends all his efforts trying to convince us this is a tough, gritty drama about cops on the street. And for the first fifteen minutes or so we buy into it. But then, as one ridiculous scene piles on top of another, we gradually realize the entire movie's a con job. My guess is that everything Carnahan thinks he knows about police work came from reruns of Kojak.

Jason Patric plays an undercover narcotics officer whose career swan dives into the dumper when he accidentally shoots a pregnant civilian. The baby dies, and since he's a cop this is viewed as a bad thing. (Had he been a doctor, it'd be a different story.) As the door is in mid-swing to hit him on the ass on his way out, he's offered a chance to redeem himself. Seems there's an unsolved murder of another undercover narc, and Patric's knowledge of the street pharmaceutical trade could prove invaluable in tracking down the murderers. Of course, his wife-with-the-baby-girl® has conniptions when she hears he's going back into drug enforcement, but I guess that's what wives were put on earth for. Or at least what they were put in movies for. It's gotten so that any young man applying to the police academy is told, "Come back when you have a wife and baby to yell and scream at you in your off-duty hours."

Not exactly a paragon of originality to begin with, the story then introduces us to Ray Liotta, the dead-cop's-former-partner®. Now ol' Ray is so obviously a dirty cop, it should probably state this in his job title, but the movie seems to think it's clever playing the "is he or isn't he?" game with us. Which might've worked if it weren't busy reproducing every cliché known to man along the way. We know Ray is dirty, because everything about the way he looks and acts is exactly the way a dirty cop behaves. At least on Kojak, anyway.

The plot actually becomes confusing in places, at least with regard to the details. It doesn't help that some important revelations are disclosed at the end by Patric and Liotta SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS AT EACH OTHER NON-STOP FOR SEVERAL MINUTES WHICH SEEM LIKE HOURS AND WE'RE SOMEHOW SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY'RE SAYING WHILE ALL THE WHILE FIGHTING THE URGE TO STICK OUR FINGERS IN OUR EARS AND RUN SCREAMING FROM THE THEATER. That's assuming you even care by this point - I didn't. Then, as far as the "ultimate revelation" goes, I jokingly thought to myself at one point, "It would be really funny if..." And guess what? That's exactly how it turns out. Proving either that I'm brilliant or the movie's incredibly idiotic.