Rampart - 1 1/2 smiles

Critics like “Rampart,” starring Woody Harrelson, but I didn’t. Harrelson dominates the picture, but the story is full of holes and improbabilities and becomes increasingly unrealistic and uninteresting as it moves to its unsatisfying conclusion. Co-written by James Ellroy and Oren Moverman and directed by Moverman, the movie has nothing much to do with the LAPD Rampart scandal of the 1990s although it hovers in the background. Rather it focuses on one dirty cop in 1999. With his cigarettes, aviators, racist talk and ready pistol, Harrelson’s Officer Dave Brown is contemptible with a heart as black as his soul. Each sequence, scenes of him boozing and picking up women in bars, beating up handcuffed suspects and shaking down pharmacists for drugs, adds more evidence to Brown’s growing list of sins, but as if that’s not enough, Moverman adds hunks of verbose dialogue to further reinforce our understanding that Brown is a despicable man.

Moverman has assembled a talented supporting cast that includes Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche as sisters Brown serially married; a handicapped street misfit (Ben Foster); a randy lawyer (Robin Wright); a retired cop (Ned Beatty); a police brass attorney (Sigourney Weaver) and an Internal Affairs cop (Ice Cube). They add some luster to the story, but they don't really help all of the plot points that dead end or the issues that appear and then disappear. Harrelson has thrown himself into the role, but the sheer repetitiveness of his evil tends to be wearying rather than refreshing and instead of providing any understanding, “Rampart” only gives us questions. Do you really care? I say no. 2/19/12