Three detectives in the corrupt and brutal L.A. police force of the 1950s use differing methods to uncover a conspiracy behind the shotgun slayings of the patrons at an all-night diner.
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CinemaSerf
7
By CinemaSerf
After the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of the folks at a diner, it's the ambitious "Exley" (Guy Pearce) who suggests to his bosses that it's time for the LAPD to get it's act together and root out the corruption endemic within the force. To that end, he is promoted by "Capt. Smith" (James Cornwall) and sets about trying to assert a bit more of the rule of law rather than the rule of vengeance - that'd be the "White" (Russell Crowe) method, or the more venal and sleazy fashion of "Vincennes" (Kevin Spacey). Needless to say, nobody takes kindly to this new pure as the driven snow approach, but gradually "Exley" starts to make a bit of headway into the world of organised crime, and to realise just how involved the police are in covering up crimes from fraud to murder. He's also aware that someone is pulling his strings, so some sort of rapport with one of his suspicions colleagues is going to have to be forged if he is to stay alive! Each of these characters get their moment in the sun and that allows us to meet the unscrupulous red-top publisher "Hudgens" (an energetic Danny DeVito) and the sophisticated call-girl "Lynn" (Kim Basinger) who is quite often pretending to be Veronica Lake! I think my only problem with this film was that I reckoned on who was doing what really early on, so the jeopardy was a little bit compromised. That said, though, it's one of Crowe's more natural performances and Pearce shows us he can deliver gritty and bruising parts well too. I could have been doing with a little more of Basinger's quite intriguing character, just to break up the relentlessness of the story a bit more, but it's a solid adaptation of James Ellroy's uncompromising book that Curtis Hanson presents and it doesn't hang about.
