Film Review: One Tough Cop (1998)
There is a certain species of late-Nineties American cop picture that arrives on screen already exhausted, and One Tough Cop is its archetype. It is not a bad film so much as a film assembled from the leftovers of better ones, and its real interest lies less in what it does than in how nakedly it admits what it is doing.
The picture is adapted from the autobiography of Bo Dietl, a former NYPD detective whose career was eventful enough to supply the raw material for Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, and whose post-retirement self-promotion was at least as energetic as his police work. Dietl is played here by Stephen Baldwin and sold as a detective who will stop at nothing to clear the streets of violent men — nothing, that is, except betraying the friends he grew up with. Chief among those friends is Richie La Cassa (Mike McGlone), a neighbourhood boy made good as a local mafia boss, and Dietl is perfectly relaxed about the arrangement so long as Richie's men keep doing him small favours — among them helping him track down two thugs who raped, mutilated and battered a sick nun.
Meanwhile his loyal partner Duke Finnerly (Chris Penn) has gone to seed on drink and gambling and now owes money to Richie's loan shark, Frankie "Hot" Salvino (Paul Guilfoyle). And hovering over all of it are the Feds, who see Dietl as the ideal instrument for setting a trap for Richie — even if they have to squeeze him with a corruption charge to get him to play along.
The plot, in other words, is a full set of police-film furniture: the alcoholic partner, the friendly mafioso, the greasy Feds, the sick nun, the loyalty-versus-duty dilemma. Jeremy Iacone's screenplay crams every cliché of the preceding three decades into ninety minutes with almost manic even-handedness, and the cumulative effect is less homage than checklist. One genuinely gets the impression that the makers had set out to parody the genre and then forgot to tell the actors.
It is a shame, because the direction is in respectable hands. Bruno Barreto (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) is a serious Brazilian filmmaker who has made a habit of occasionally working in America, and he does manage to lend a handful of otherwise stale scenes a flicker of visual personality. But he cannot lift the material above its own derivativeness, and the film's cheapjack production values do him no favours.
What rescues the thing from total ignominy is the cast. Penn — always reliable in character parts — takes the loser's role and wears it as though it had been cut to measure, and his slow decline supplies the picture's only real emotional traction. Baldwin is adequate rather than interesting in the lead, and Gina Gershon, Amy Irving and Victor Slezak are largely squandered. There is something telling about the presence of Dietl himself in a small cameo as a detective: the film is, in the end, a vanity project that its own subject could not resist walking through.
One Tough Cop scrapes a pass and no more. It is watchable, workmanlike and instantly forgettable — the cinematic equivalent of an episode of NYPD Blue stretched to feature length with a bigger budget and a weaker script. A viewer would spend those ninety minutes far better served by watching two episodes of NYPD Blue instead.
Rating: 4/10
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