We’ve all seen this movie before: a hard-nosed cop bends the law to keep bad guys off the street, blasting the cowardly suits in the department who privilege political correctness over public safety. When he walks into an interrogation room, everyone finds somewhere else to be; when he comes back out, the brutalized suspect has given up the information they need. A Vietnam veteran with 24 years on the force, Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) lives for the Los Angeles Police Department, its valor and esprit de corps. “This used to be a glorious soldiers’ department,” he laments to his fellow officers in the movie’s opening scene, as they stand around the parking lot of a hot dog stand. “Now it’s . . .” He singles out the female rookie who’s riding with him. “. . . you.” The other officers laugh, and for good measure the cop browbeats her into finishing the carton of greasy fries that came with her meal. “Didn’t your dad ever discipline you?” he asks. “I never knew my dad,” she deadpans. “He wasn’t around.”
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It’s a neat little dig, the sort that makes you realize you haven’t seen this one before. Oren Moverman’s police drama Rampart takes place in 1999, when the LAPD’s Rampart Division, north and northwest of downtown LA, was engulfed in a giant corruption scandal. Harrelson, following up his fine performance as a steely marine in Moverman’s The Messenger, comes through again as the renegade officer, nicknamed “Date Rape Dave” for rumors that he killed a serial date rapist 12 years earlier. The role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, with assorted beatings and shootings as the crime story unfolds. But what actually dominates on-screen is the cop’s complicated relationships with women—from the police administrator coming after him for brutality complaints to the cop-hungry lookers he picks up in bars to his first and second wives, sisters who live in adjoining houses and each have a daughter by him.
Dave has more luck selling his law-and-order spiel to the women he meets in bars, though these scenes sometimes smack of hard-boiled male fantasy. He scores first with Sarah (Audra McDonald), who announces she has “a thing for cops” and winds up in a hotel room with Dave sucking on her toes. Later he hooks up with Linda (Robin Wright), whose eye he catches one evening as the video of him beating the motorist plays on the TV above the bar. She claims to be in real estate, but after their relationship gets going she admits with evident self-loathing that she’s a defense attorney for criminal suspects, helping them collect settlements from the city in the wake of the Rampart scandal. She was once on his side, as a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office, and confesses that what first drew her to him was the story that he’d killed the date rapist. “There’s no proof I killed anyone,” Dave protests wearily. “I have daughters.”
Directed by Oren Moverman
