It looks like Willis was snookered by the Hollywood mentality that always casts the star as the good guy (even though it's a role for which any number of actors would be better suited — the Nick Nolte of Affliction could have buried a fire in Jack; Jeff Daniels could have made his goodness palpable through the rot; the Tim Robbins of Mystic River might have made him creepily tormented). Frank, conceived not as a melodramatically diabolical schemer but merely a perverted enforcer of the law, has all of Jack's complexity with the butch rock-steadiness that Willis has shucked for the movie as well. The role of Frank, in fact, provides David Morse with enough material to give a major performance.

Morse is not only beefily magnetic, he also offers a more nuanced sense of what corruption does to a man. He even chews gum in a way that suggests the tension of carrying on knowing he's violated the values he's sworn to uphold. Morse suggests a whole structure of rationalizations and denial, while still functioning as the villain of the piece. He even makes Frank more believably self-loathing than Willis as Jack, and the effort it takes to keep on top of a rotten game (as opposed to sousing yourself into semi-oblivion) gives him the confident masculinity that holds this kind of "ballsy" action picture together.

Moreover, Morse's Frank displays qualities that thoughtful people will realize we need in a police force, seeing as not all criminals are child-like sugarpusses who express themselves in cake icing. We don't want rules bent, of course, but we rely on these men whose executive decisiveness charges their physicality. In this way Frank is like the character Meserve played by Sean Penn in Brian DePalma's Casualties of War (1989), which is a similar kind of redemptive romance. In Casualties of War Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), an idealistic soldier, has to overcome enormous amounts of internal and external pressure to accuse and help convict his dark double Meserve, who leads their squad in the recreational rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl after one of their buddies is killed in a Viet Cong attack. (Eriksson doesn't participate but he doesn't intervene, either.)

Earlier the battle-tested Meserve had saved the greenhorn Eriksson's life, and throughout we see what makes Meserve a great soldier, even as we see that he has snapped and is now obeying orders from his id. Meserve undergoes a comprehensible but disturbing transformation; it's one of Penn's great outré performances. Morse is more naturalistic — Frank is not a grotesque apparition out of romance, he's a man who is bearing down on himself, and those around him, with crushing stress because he has to believe that what he's doing is the right thing to do.