Ram­part

An LA-set cop sto­ry co-writ­ten by noir poet James Ell­roy? That’ll mean chain-smok­ing men in fedo­ras, gri­mac­ing their way to hard-won jus­tice amid a morass of insti­tu­tion­al cor­rup­tion, won’t it? Not this time – well, apart from the chain-smok­ing. And the corruption.

Set in 1999 but feel­ing fierce­ly con­tem­po­rary, Ell­roy and direc­tor Oren Mover­man have cre­at­ed a mod­ern noir that nods per­func­to­ri­ly at the genre’s con­ven­tions, but side­lines them as quick­ly as it can to get to its real busi­ness – a bru­tal­ly watch­able por­trait of one of mod­ern film’s great bastards.

Woody Har­rel­son – who won plau­dits for his recent turn in Moverman’s The Mes­sen­ger – has his dial turned more to nat­ur­al born killer than easy­go­ing bar­man for his career-best turn as ​‘Date-rape’ Dave Brown, a perp-whack­ing dinosaur in a world where any video­taped indis­cre­tion is beamed out on the evening news.

Avoid­ing the Dirty Har­ry trap of glam­or­is­ing a born fas­cist, Mover­man leaves us under no illu­sion that Brown is a Very Nasty Man. He’s naked­ly racist (but artic­u­late enough to get away with it), hap­pi­ly beats sus­pects for infor­ma­tion, and is filled with self-right­eous con­tempt for the mod­ernisers he sees creep­ing into the LAPD; an insti­tu­tion which, in his eyes, doesn’t so much keep peace in the city as occu­py it by force.

Throw in a com­plex home life (he mar­ried two sis­ters in suc­ces­sion, and has a daugh­ter by each) and some com­pul­sive wom­an­is­ing, and you have a dream part – one which Har­rel­son tears into, con­vinc­ing us of his brute intel­li­gence, as his clash with reform­ers sends him deep into an ago­nis­ing spi­ral of drink, vio­lence, pills, and more drink.

This is no dumb brute, either – Brown delights in ser­mon­is­ing on the hypocrisies of lib­er­al soci­ety; speech­es that leave his bet­ter edu­cat­ed supe­ri­ors stumped. Over­shad­ow­ing a pletho­ra of classy bit-play­ers, Har­rel­son is nev­er off-screen and has nev­er been bet­ter. Mover­man more than match­es him, shoot­ing LA’s streets in harsh bright tones by day and sick­ly sodi­um light by night that are a mil­lion miles from the sheen of Michael Mann or Nico­las Wind­ing Refn.

Some have sniffed over the sidelin­ing of the real-life con­text – 1999 saw the actu­al Ram­part divi­sion caught in a scan­dal where the cops and crim­i­nals became hard to tell apart, but Ram­part the film mere­ly hints at the polit­i­cal shit­storm going on else­where. It’s a bold as well as a wise move, keep­ing the film away from any tedious drama­tis­ing of the ​‘issues’, and dialling in on one man who embod­ies them all anyway.

Because if one cop can sink this low and still wear a badge, it doesn’t take a diplo­ma in soci­ol­o­gy to see that the LAPD had to change.