The last few months have provided us with some iconic imagery of police violence in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement -- Lt. John Pike casually pepper spraying a group of UC Davis students like he's Febrezing a sofa, 84-year-old Dorli Rainey being helped away from a confrontation in Seattle after being doused herself, Marine Scott Olsen getting carried out through a haze of tear gas in Oakland with a fractured skull. These recent events lend Oren Moverman's Rampart a queasy immediacy even though it's set in the '90s, as the LAPD's Rampart Division struggles through the notorious police misconduct scandal that ended up implicating dozens of officers and inspired the likes of Training Day and The Shield.
Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), the bad, bad beat cop -- the self-proclaimed "one cop who gets it" -- at the film's center, wields far heavier artillery than a canister of spray and regularly crosses major lines of corruption and brutality, but the psychological core stands -- there's room to hide or rationalize away almost anything in the name of maintaining authority, upholding order, us against them and any means necessary.
Both enthralling and draining, Rampart is a claustrophobic account of Brown's downward spiral, or at least an accelerating chunk of it -- things haven't been going quite right for him for a while. Brown is, as his teenager daughter tells him caustically to his face, a "dinosaur," a would-be mix of Dirty Harry and John Wayne who's at least half as smart as he's convinced he is. It's a dream of a role for Harrelson, who's the camera's constant quavering focus, and who keeps us torn between being drawn in and repulsed by this disastrous, magnetic character. And we're not the only ones -- Brown may not have many…
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