“I don’t think I want to be a cop anymore.”

Plot Summary: After the nightclub shooting of a rap group, two L.A. homicide detectives - a seasoned veteran (Harrison Ford) and a green rookie ( Josh Hartnet) -  reluctantly team up to solve the case.

Review:

Ron (Bull Durham) Shelton has built a career out of writing and directing sports movies, but he must be running out of sports ideas because lately he seems to have turned his attention to cop movies. But I’d rather see him make a documentary about curling than do another action comedy buddy movie as lame as Hollywood Homicide. Starring Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett as L.A. homicide detectives investigating the murder of a rap group (which unfortunately gives Shelton the excuse to assault the audience with pounding rap music every time there’s an action scene), the film’s comic gimmick is that both detectives would rather be doing something else. Ford wants to be a wealthy real estate broker and so he spends as much time negotiating deals as he does trying to solve the case - often at the same time. A one-joke premise stretched to two hours, the attempts at humor quickly start to fall flat. It’s pretty funny the first time Ford works both of his jobs at once. Not so much by the tenth time. By the twentieth time, roughly when he’s negotiating a deal on his cell phone during a high speed car chase, you may wish Verizon hadn’t given him so many minutes on that damn thing. And yet it’s particularly fitting that Ford should spend so much time on his cell since he’s so obviously phoning in his performance.  Meanwhile, Hartnett moonlights as a yoga instructor and dreams of breaking into acting by playing Stanley Kowalski, and so in between solving the case he twists himself into yoga positions and yells “Stella” a few times. Yes, both characters wish they were something else, and so do I: interesting characters.

Posted on April 9th, 2008 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews