Rampart wasn’t what I expected, and that’s a good thing. I thought we’d see a lunatic displaying a ton of violence and bad temper explosions. What we get is a diabolically slow burn through an amazing performance by Woody Harrelson. I was expecting the ranting of an insane powder keg ready to blow, instead this is a profile of an intellectual, yet bull-headed cop unwilling to take his political medicine. Oh, and he beats and kills people he thinks deserve it. The film is set in 1999, during the Rampart scandal when more than 70 cops were charged with acts of unprovoked brutality in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart division.
In this case, the film focuses on Officer Dave Brown (Harrelson), who serves as a composite of the dozens of problems cops implicated in the scandal. Brown is a racist badass who wantonly prowls the city. The story picks up after Brown is caught on videotape as he beats a suspect.
It’s seems like forever since funnyman Will Ferrell released a movie worth talking about. With recent mega-duds like Land of the Lost and The Other Guys, my expectations for Ferrell’s career were quickly fading. His comedic prowess has drastically dwindled since his classic characters such as NASCAR misfit Ricky Bobby and the legendary anchorman Ron Burgundy. But now, in a movie I was quite skeptical about, he has made me laugh again.
Here’s what’s remarkable and extraordinary about Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: not all that much, really. Don’t misunderstand; there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a solid, satisfying read, no crime against literature, unlike other much-adored recent book series we could name. But Collins mines familiar dystopian ground, building around the kind of public-spectacle blood-and-circuses concept that has fueled everything, from Logan’s Run to Death Race 2000, from The Running Man to the Japanese Battle Royale. Once again, the future’s such a blight, you gotta wear blades.
