Hollywood Homicide (Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett)
no gummy bears
Harrison Ford's latest effort is a perplexing attempt to mix comedy with a crime investigation movie. A bona fide star who has brought such memorable characters as Han Solo and Indiana Jones to life, Ford is reduced to playing a wannabe salesman posing as a police officer, interrupted every so often by an awkward romantic scene involving a pastry (I donut know what he was thinking). After questionable outings such as What Lies Beneath, Six Days and Seven Nights and K19: The Widowmaker (all of which, incidentally, I have not seen but am under the impression they were nevertheless questionable), Hollywood Homicide becomes a telltale sign that not only is Ford no longer the bankable movie star he once was, but more importantly his choice of projects, and his performances in them, are becoming increasingly suspect.
Ford plays Joe Gavilan, a cop who would much rather be selling real estate than putting bad guys behind bars. His professional partner is K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett), a young upstart who would much rather be practicing yoga or auditioning for local rep theatre companies. Together, they work on finding out who is behind the execution-style murder of three prominent hip-hop artists. As they follow their leads while cruising through Tinseltown, they are constantly pulled away from their tasks at hand by their cell phones, which ingratiatingly play the melodies to "Funkytown" and "My Girl" something like 30 times. It's a wonder it doesn't take them six years to get to the end of the film (although it sometimes feels that long anyway).
What a disastrous piece of work this film is. Even though it is clear the dynamic duo aren't supposed to enjoy their primary professions, not for one moment are either Ford or Hartnett believable as cops. This would not be so crucial a plot point if the movie didn't fall back so often on the homicide investigation itself. Somehow, sandwiched amongst all the buddy-flick new age-zen gettin'-to-know-ya rabble, a murder needs to be solved, and the movie stops dead in its tracks whenever it tries to go in any new direction; which is every few minutes. Ford and Hartnett are tragically miscast, wallowing kneedeep through a screenplay that would ordinarily have been put to sleep if it had been submitted to a studio by a starry-eyed rookie. It is clear here that writer-director Ron Shelton is uanble to make even the most moronic of subject matter entertaining.
The movie tries to be funny and ironic, and that's part of the problem. It tries too hard to be over-the-top in some scenes and deadpan serious in others. At one point, Ford and Hartnett are in separate questioning rooms, being grilled by internal affairs. The scene features ringing cell phones and yoga instruction when a wittier situation would have had the two wisecrackers smartening up right away and then allowed the humour to come from their dialogue with their interrogators. Instead, it's all forced gags and awful dialogue.
It doesn't help that there are also way too many bad clichés. When a cliché works in tandem with the material, then it is okay. Here though, they are off-putting and, worse, unfunny. During a lengthy and excruciating good cop vs. bad guy chase scene, Ford steals a little girl's pink bicycle in order to stay in the hunt. Hartnett commandeers a vehicle from a mother with two kids screaming in the back seat. And all this culminates in a showdown between the bad guy and Hartnett, who confronts the man who killed his dad (who was, naturally, a police officer as well). Read these old hats their rights, please.
Worse still, these misfires don't even begin to explain the appearances of Lena Olin as an erratic radio psychic, Dwight Yoakam as a psychopath and Lou Diamond Phillips as an undercover cop in drag. Even Bruce Greenwood, an actor whom I usually admire, is wasted here as the token cop who has it in for the protagonists, regardless of the merits of his deluded witchhunt. From top to bottom, the entire cast appears bored here, and their lack of confidence in the material shows in spades.
By the end of Hollywood Homicide, no laughs are generated, no stunts are gasp-worthy, and no set-ups end up paying off. It's as if the makers were afraid to give it more bite, which is a distinct possibility given the subject matter it claims to lampoon. That doesn't excuse this frivolous abomination of a movie, which is easily one of the worst I've seen in the past ten years. Ford is no spring chicken, and much has been made of his inability to credibly pull off action scenes these days, but this picture is downright embarrassing to watch. As he jumps through traffic and dodges bullets with a cell phone in his ear, fielding prospective bids for his homes, one gets the feeling that Joe Gavilan should switch over to a less volatile field of work, and Ford should closely follow suit. Pronto.
