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.
My boyfriend liked Mos Def best, and his role and eccentrically stylized delivery do make the movie seem as if it isn't just a straight shot to Jack's triumphant salvation. For me, however, the movie works, to the extent it can be said to work at all, because of those three confrontations between Willis and Morse. In the final face-off the former partners — spiritual twins — lay out their opposing views of how they've soiled the practice of law enforcement. Willis is crippled by miscasting, but Morse would be formidable opposition for any actor. It isn't just his physical presence; his timing and delivery are at the concert level here.
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