The tale of the sadistic, psychotic policeman is not a new one, but Woody Harrelson is fierce and frightening as a rogue in “Rampart,” a police district in Los Angeles, its own, real history rabid enough to earn its own movie. Harrelson, his face a series of reddish-tan angles sticking out from behind aviator sunglasses. He refers to himself as a soldier in the people’s army, and he is convinced he is the only law west of the La Brea tar pits.
He smokes constantly, drinks between puffs. He’s been married twice, to sisters (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche) who live next door to one another on a bungalow-lined street. There are daughters (Brie Larson and Sammy Boyarsky) from the relationships, and he still drops by for occasional sex, or to harshly discipline his children. On other nights he prowls seedy bars in search of women, or visits sex clubs. Obviously, he’s a real charmer.
He’s smart, too, wriggling out of a variety of disciplinary hearings with a mixture of lies and bravado. Sigourney Weaver works in the district attorney’s office; she’s on to him, and she’s waiting patiently for the inevitable mistake. Ice Cube is waiting, too. Harrelson has one ally, or so he thinks, a crooked former cop, played stylishly by Ned Beatty.
Oren Moverman directs, moving stylishly from one tense moment to the next, helped along by Bobby Bukowki’s nervous camera work that ratchets everything tighter from scene to scene. Moverman and Harrelson worked together in 2009 when Harrelson and Ben Foster starred in “The Messenger,” a story of two officers who bring bad news to homes where no one expects it. Foster is in “Rampart,” too, as an addled, homeless man in a wheelchair who brings tips to Harrelson in exchange for whiskey, cigarettes and pain from his buddy the bully.
For a movie that created little more than a ripple when it was released in 2010 (this is its first St. Louis appearance), it has a surprisingly talented cast including Audra McDonald, Robin Wright and Steve Buscemi in addition to those mentioned above. But it is a powerful, taut, well-made movie. Perhaps people just didn’t want to see another tale of a vicious, violent man, no matter which side of the law he lived on.
Rampart opens today at the Tivoli.
— Joe