A slicker, mainstreamier Bad Lieutenant, tagging along on an interminable work shift with a crooked L.A. narc. Even if you are prepared to believe the worst of the police (even if, perchance, you were a member of the O. J. Simpson jury), it's a stretch to believe that any cop would parade his badness quite so openly in front of a first-day trainee, no matter how eager to please and needy of endorsement the trainee might be. It's a stretch of another sort for Denzel Washington to be the bad guy, and it brings out his less commanding -- his showy and flourishy -- side. Ethan Hawke, as the greenhorn, is too light a weight to hold his own, even so. Toward the end, director Antoine Fuqua engineers a couple of tense sequences, when the dirty cop abandons the squeaky-clean one in a den of cutthroats, and when the latter sets out to get even. But the relief of tension in that first sequence is so laughably miraculous (or in the vernacular, "some trippy-ass shit") that it rather dampens the tension of the second into the bargain. Scott Glenn, Cliff Curtis, Macy Gray. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.