NARC (Joe Carnahan, 2002)

Reviewed: December 21st, 2002

Photographed in the de facto, metallic blue hue directors and cinematographers use whenever trying to convince us their movie was shot in Detroit (see also: 8 Mile), Joe Carnahan's Narc -- a mediocre genre flick notable only for its leading performances -- tells us it's cold and gritty through its colors (or lack thereof) and the fact we can see its actors' breaths every time they exhale. Oh, and because lots of people get assaulted. A cop film, you see, cannot be a cop film unless plenty of humans are brutally beaten senseless, bloodied to a pulp because they didn't provide whatever information they were supposed to fast enough. Snoring yet? I went to Narc because some critics are inexplicably convinced it's more than a standard crime flick we've seen uncountable times previous, but they are, of course, entirely wrong. Jason Patric's sly fox and Ray Liotta's rabid dog interplay is effective, sometimes even inspired, but they're caught in a muddled plot and I didn't buy the ending one bit. In the scheme of the last two decades' crime pics I suppose Narc is a vaguely upper-echelon work (sound the damning with faint praise alarm!), it has vigor and momentum and verisimilitude and occasionally even convinces you it might be more than it initially appears to, but no, alas, that's not the case. Narc's a modest little flick with the standard genre cliches set firmly into place: unlikely partner pairing, shooting gone wrong/cop feeling the heat for it, possibly corrupt cop, convolution, cop with wife and child who worry about him, cop with dead wife, wife of dead cop, etc. etc. and so on and so forth. I wish I could report Carnahan manages to impose a refreshing stamp onto all of these elements but... ummm... he doesn't. Instead he just cranks everything up far too often, what with his nine different film stocks for the three flashbacks every two seconds (and one particularly ill-advised sequence that uses a four way split screen for no reason). His best scenes are his calmest; I advise him to chill out and (re)watch perhaps the greatest straight crime flick ever made, The French Connection, noting its incredibly powerful stylistic simplicity. I also advise him to (re)watch the remarkable and key word restrained manner in which Christopher Nolan expertly uses quick little blips of flashbacking in Memento and Insomnia. An audience doesn't need to be pummeled into submission. Suggestion is always more potent than explicitness. Thank you, that is all.

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