A recurring character played by Bruno Kirby on David Letterman’s show used to pop up randomly on the set and announce gravely, “I’m not just a cop.” (Dramatic pause.) “I’m a cop on the edge!” For two hours of the same, spattered with unclean language and bad nastiness, see “Rampart.”
Co-written by James Ellroy and Oren Moverman and directed by Moverman (who made the spectacularly overwrought “The Messenger”), the movie has nothing much to do with the LAPD’s Rampart scandal of the 1990s, which is depicted as festering in the background, but keeps its cameras focused at pore level on the agonies of a rageful cop in 1999.
With his cigarette and his aviators, racist talk and a ready pistol, Woody Harrelson revels in this role. He is the sole reason to see the movie, which is a pointless visit with an unpleasant man, but he is enough. His Officer Dave Brown is magnetically vile — weirdly humorous, hate-fired, with a soul as ugly as his furniture. Is he racist? Dave objects: “I hate everyone equally.”
Early in the film, as Dave deals (not unlovingly) with his bizarre family — he has had a daughter with each of two sisters (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche), and all five of them live together — there is some reason to hope that Moverman might be interested in portraying Dave as a human being, however rough his sense of justice. Dave once murdered a serial date rapist (earning him the sobriquet “Date Rape Dave”), and when he is suspended after being caught on video beating up an unarmed Latino, he has good reason to complain that he is being portrayed unfairly. Seconds before the video begins, the victim slammed his car into Dave’s, then smashed his car door into the cop and ran for it. One of the women (Robin Wright) he picks up in his local bar says he moves like John Wayne.
As the movie drags on, though, it takes on a throbbing, sick monotone. This isn’t a concert, it’s a bass guitar solo, all thumping blackness. Dave’s actions aren’t merely extreme, but depraved, and the innumerable scenes of him boozing, wandering through an orgy, floating near the bottom of a swimming pool and shaking down pharmacists for drugs are hammered in with Moverman’s visual style (insistent murk, shaky hand-held cameras, close-ups that would nauseate a dermatologist), then re-hammered with blunt-nosed hunks of unfortunate dialogue. We really don’t need all the speeches in which his ladyfolk tell him he’s despicable: “Selfish, selfish man, Dave!”
To give the movie a small amount of forward momentum, Dave tries to unravel a mystery about who “set me up,” but it doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if anybody had to push him very hard to bust him open (he admits he has killed lots of criminals, not just the date rapist), and anyway, this trail doesn’t lead to a resolution.
Harrelson’s fearsome appeal reminds us that he’s been underused in the movies, though. He’s a forceful actor who is at his best when playing man at his worst. How he must have hated himself all those years he was on “Cheers.”