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Hollywood Homicide

Movie Hollywood Homicide Director Ron Shelton Cast Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Isaiah Washinton

By Subhash K Jha

Check this out. Harrison Ford and his cornily clairvoyant girlfriend (Lena Olin) are caught in a compromising position. She slithers on him on the bed and yanks off his trousers. "Naughty cop, no doughnut for you," Olin ovulates opulently. Phew! Harrison Ford has a field day playing cop Joe Gavilian whose job doesn’t fetch him enough moolah to make ends meet. Ford's character is glint-eyed, wonky, wicked , mischievous, raunchy and open to a bit of wheelingdealing, Ford can afford to let his hair down. He’s reached THAT stage in his career where he can just do a cop film without worrying about the plot. Everyone’s doing one of those. Why, just last week Samuel Jackson teamed up with Colin Farrrell to do a cops’ day out in SWAT. In Hollywood Homicide Ford and his young partner Josh Hartnett (the Pearl Harbour romanticist, now going into a role that allows him to be selfdeprecatory, ironical and yet heroic) seem perfectly co-ordinated in their dissimilarities. Ford is wry and cynical, Hartnett is compassionate and spiritual. The older cop wants money to pay for his bills. The junior just floats in a stratosphere of unbridled selfesearching where women and other pleasures simply fall on his lap. Both actors are both amusing in their peculiar brand of existentialism. And yet they’re both similar in one aspect: the cop’s job doesn’t seem to interest them much. That brings me to the film’s main problem. It concerns itself with everything except the homicide on hand. The film opens with two machinegun-toting assassins mowing down a whole music band. There’s no mystery or suspense involved in the crime. We soon know that the main suspect is none other than the head of the recording company (Isaiah Washington) who guns down the group for breaking the contract. Ooh, drastic measures! In Hollywood Homicide director Ron Shelton tries to play it ultra-cool, and succeeds in fragments. Most of the film’s humour depends on the two protagonists’ seeming indifference to their job, so much so that the film’s main murder-plot begins to seem subsidiary to what looks like a series of televised Miami Vice escapades done with a toss of the shoulder that denotes a mood of designer-machismo. When the prelusory mayhem happens the two cop-heroes arrive at the scene, and begin to order lunch in the midst of the brutally slayed corpses. At the end of the prolonged car chase Hartnett who wants to give up lawry to become an actor (Ford’s reaction: "Are you gay?…Look who wants to be Robert de Niro!") gets down on his knees in front of villain(who had –surprise surprise— killed Hartnett’s cop-father many years ago) and whines and pleads for his life. "Wasn’t that a terrific performance?" Hartnett exclaims, and guns down the villain. Sure, as a wannabe actor Hartnett gets to ham to his heart’s content both on screen and on stage (check Hartnett do Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire while Harrison Ford holds the audience down almost at gunpoint). Harrison Ford has no such privileges. The moments that are intended to be really amusing (for example, Hartnett catching a hooker getting into his wry partner’s car immediately after he advises the older, though not wiser, cop to "get laid") barely bring a smile. The action is appealing to a point. Though SWAT goes through the chase-phase with more grace. Director Ron Shelton has made several sports-based films like White Men Can’t Jump and Bull Durham. In Hollywood Homicide he applies the sporty spirit to a gruesome crime theme. The mix of flippancy and crime doesn’t quite work. But you can watch the film for Ford and Hartnett. Both are splendid in their casual-cops avatar. Wish the film took itself more seriously. "We’ve never seen such excitement in Hollywood before," an airborne surveillance officer announces while the two heroes chase the two villains (one each, a la Hindi films). Wish we could share that redhot excitement. Hollywood Homicide is like a group orgy where the couples are ready to get going. But the condoms never arrive.