Back in the good old days of carte blanche police brutality: L.A. in the early Fifties, in the company of the four felt-hatted musketeers -- the hard-punching untouchables -- of Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn. (The New Zealand director, Lee Tamahori, proven poet of bar fights and spousal battery in Once Were Warriors, has been summoned to Hollywood to keep the action abrupt and ferocious.) The murder-mystery plotline, after an intriguing set-up, is fairly straight-ahead and gently downhill, the twists in it easily negotiable, the rounded-up suspects very few, and the thematic implications -- despite earth-shaking encounters with the head of the Atomic Energy Commission and musclemen on behalf of the U.S. military and the FBI -- are quite humble. And we get little out of the period aside from a nice selection of its clothes, cars, architecture. And oh yes, that bittersweetly re-enacted police brutality. A dead-end nostalgia voyage on all fronts. Nolte, by custom, is top-notch -- simultaneously tough and tortured, intimidating and vulnerable. And Palminteri is aided immeasurably by the role requirement that keeps his hairpiece hidden beneath the unremovable hat. Only these two of the fearsome foursome (character names: Hoover and Coolidge!) have much to do, though Madsen and Penn look no less splendid in their duds. Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Connelly, Treat Williams, Andrew McCarthy, John Malkovich. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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