David Mamet, director and writer, describes an existential identity crisis under the guise of a hard-boiled policier. Such a thing could easily have turned pretentious if the plotting and scripting had been less nose-to-the-grindstone. To be more exact: the identity crisis is at no point extracurricular to the police work (we see nothing of the man's home life), but develops gradually and organically in the middle ground between the ongoing manhunt for a black drug lord and the unrelated case that intersects with it. A homicide detective (Joe Mantegna) is en route to a major bust in the drug case when he is sidetracked by what looks to be a page-twenty-eight murder of an elderly Jewish shopkeeper in a predominantly black ghetto. The dead woman's surprisingly affluent and influential family wants this same detective, himself a Jew, to stay on the case, while he personally would prefer to return to the case that his cohorts refer to (with increasing irony) as "the big one." But the shopkeeper's murder, following a formula known picturesquely as the ball-of-twine plot (the loose strand that, when gathered up, keeps growing and growing in implication), might be a bigger deal than first appeared. Thinly but cleverly plotted (note the many ramifications of the torn holster strap), the movie is satisfying both as a police story and as, what's rare in a proficient genre piece, an exploration of character. Satisfying as a police story, that is, as long as you don't mind a case that evaporates in the course of investigation (a strand of twine that ultimately leads nowhere). (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.