Since Lethal Weapon (1987) the male co-stars of comic cop-buddy pictures have engaged in hotwired patter between action setpieces and unconventional behavior in the action setpieces that sends them into fireball hyperdrive. You get some laughs and more mayhem than on a ghoulish child's dreamed-of best day at the racetrack. (I believe Richard Rush's Freebie and the Bean (1974) starring James Caan and Alan Arkin set the trend, but the Lethal Weapon series popularized it.) Ron Shelton's Hollywood Homicide goes even farther, but in an eccentric direction: the comic by-play that is the background in cop pictures has been developed to such an extent it looms over the foreground. The routine criminal investigation and the violence it leads to are always so rote as to be insignificant; in Hollywood Homicide the personality material is so enjoyable the insignificance of the plot isn't offensive. Who cares about all that crap, anyway? The bad guys are unmasked and fall hard. What more do you need to know?
Instead the movie focuses on the comic desperation and confusion of Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett as a veteran homicide detective and his junior partner, both of whom have an uncertain sense of vocation in a very L.A. way. Ford has tried to supplement his income by branching out into real estate and has sunk all his money in a mansion he can't unload, while car and alimony payments eat up the income he was hoping to augment. Hartnett initially started teaching yoga to get laid but has increasingly come to appreciate the spiritual element; his outlook on life has opened up enough, anyway, that he thinks he'd rather be an actor than a cop and so is in rehearsals for a showcase production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
The script draws on a genuine phenomenon: the way Southern Californians intertwine the urges to be more and to have more, the spiritual and the material. The lure of elusive open possibility has unsettled these cops' sense of calling without leading them where they hoped to go. Even yoga hasn't been exactly what Hartnett expected--it's been both more and less. SoCal puts you in a muzzy, relativist head, so you think, Sure it's corrupt of him to nail his female students on the road to enlightenment, but is that worse than the guys nailing girls who aren't on the road at all? The great Lena Olin rounds out the trio as the alluring radio psychic Ford is seeing. Sometimes she has telepathic visions and sometimes, as she admits, she just makes shit up. It's more than a living, it's a way of life.
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