The last time Woody Harrelson teamed up with director Oren Moverman, he was playing a gruff recruitment officer in The Messenger. Harrelson’s character was a bit of a hard ass in that movie, but he only played a supporting role to Ben Foster’s protagonist. This time around Moverman is directing Harrelson as a character that’s more than just gruff, he’s downright villainous; and also he happens to be our protagonist.
Rampart is one of those corrupt cop dramas, set in L.A. at the end of the 90s, back when the LAPD was still feeling the sting of the Rodney King fiasco. Harrelson plays Dave Brown, a Vietnam vet turned police officer who isn’t afraid to rough somebody up to get a confession, put a gun in someone’s hands to justify shooting them, or shake a dealer down for his cash. When we first meet him it’s during a pretty innocuous lunch scene, and even there he’s spouting racist lingo and bullying a female officer, treating her like a child and telling her she has to finish all of her fries before she’s allowed to leave. Basically, Brown is a real jerk.
Creating a character who is a cop and also a jerk isn’t really enough of a reason to make a movie though. There have been roughly one million corrupt cop movies down through the decades, so in order to make another one and have it stand out, a filmmaker is going to need to have some tricks up his sleeve. The problem with Moverman’s latest is, for the majority of its runtime, it doesn’t have anything special going on at all. Brown is divorced, he has kids who he’s not the best father to, he’s a womanizer, he’s down on his luck, and everything he does seems to stem from the rage and helplessness that comes from extreme loneliness. That’s fine and all, but it’s nothing that hasn’t already been done to death on film. Moverman gives us clichéd situations, hard boiled dialogue that sounds like it could have come out of any number of early 90s thrillers, and scenes of Brown wallowing in the shadows while smoking cigarettes; it’s all very moody, but ultimately shallow. I really like Harrelson as an actor, and I was thrilled to see him getting a starring role here; but I would have liked him to get slightly better material.
One aspect of his character that I did enjoy was a running gag that he’s good enough at weaving technical jargon into his bullshit that he’s often able to bully higher ups into ignoring his misdeeds with threats of litigation. I wish the way he uses charm and pseudo-intellectualism as a crutch could have been explored further, but instead the focus is all on angsty, angry guy stuff. By the end of the film Rampart does manage to go places that I haven’t seen many cop dramas go before; it goes so far down the rabbit hole that we spend time watching hallucinatory sequences as Harrelson’s character loses his mind, and we spend time in seedy, underground sex dungeons as we watch him attempt to hit bottom. This isn’t just a dirty cop, this is a Bad Lieutenant level dirty cop, and in the third act he had started to get interesting, but the movie just took too long to get there. I would have responded stronger to it if it was all crazy, all the time.
I feel like I’ve done a lot of complaining here so far. There were plenty of things I liked about this one too, so don’t write it off as not being worth your time. Mostly, this one is worth your time just because the acting is all really good. Harrelson is strong in the lead, despite his character being a generic archetype. Also, Ben Foster shows up playing a homeless man in a wheelchair, and every second that he’s on screen is just a delight. He’s authentic as a downtrodden wacko but, at the same time, still charismatic in the role, and I wish his short-lived relationship with Brown could have been a more important part of the story. Robin Wright plays a sort-of love interest for Brown, a mysterious intentioned lawyer named Linda. She had a lot of sadness going on in her eyes in this one. This Linda character has been through something, but we’re not told what; her past is only hinted at through Wright’s facial expressions and closed off body language. It’s a subtle performance, yet I almost didn’t recognize Wright because she was looking so hard-traveled and dour.
Moverman and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski do good work with the camera as well. Rampart has a documentary feel. A lot of the camera work is handheld, and often we’re peaking at the action from behind something, getting half of the conversation obscured. When done wrong, that can be really annoying, but here it’s pulled off well enough that it added an element of realism and voyeurism to the story that elevated it a notch. There was one conversation scene in an office where we got a Michael Bay-style camera spinning circles around the room that I don’t really want to talk about, but other than that I would say that Rampart manages to look great and present its story effectively. If you’re in the mood for a cop movie some lazy afternoon, this would be a good one to grab and check out. But seeing as it only has a limited theatrical release, I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it. Ultimately, it doesn’t live up to the potential that The Messenger showed.
