Once upon a time, Hollywood was capable of churning out gritty, realistic police thrillers that didn't have to rely on pyrotechnics, one-liners or bad guys more charismatic than the good. Their stories were straightforward, but their characters weren't. The cops and detectives that inhabited the cinematic worlds of The French Connection, To Live and Die In L.A., Prince Of The City and Dirty Harry may have been out to do good, but their approach as well as the set of morals and ethics they did their jobs by were questionable to say the least.
Narc, the new police thriller written and directed by Joe Carnahan, is a welcome return to that type of filmmaking. It's the story of undercover narcotics officer Nick Tellis (Jason Patric). Suspended for eighteen months following a botched job that resulted in a civilian death, Tellis is reluctantly drawn back onto the force to help find the truth behind the murder of a young police officer killed on the job. Tellis is teamed with Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), the slain officer's partner, a cop who will stop at nothing to avenge his friend's death. As Tellis and Oak unravel the case, the dark underbelly of the narcotics world reveals itself in ways that are more twisted than either officer has seen before and the mystery that slowly reveals itself threatens to finish them both off.
Narc does have a fair amount of elements that ring familiar - cops on the edge, the possibility of corruption within the department, the wife who can't take any more of her husband's dangerous line of work, etc. It is Carnahan's detailed, no-nonsense approach to the material that is what successfully sets this film apart from recent genre entries. Employing a hand-held, documentary-style approach by cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy to great effect, Carnahan captures the bleakness of wintertime Detroit, its drug underworld and the minutiae of undercover police work perfectly. His screenplay eschews sermonizing, contains characters with more than one dimension and delivers a plot twist at the end that puts all that came before in a new perspective, leaving the viewer no easy answers and a lot to think about.
Patric is excellent as Tellis, internalizing his performance to great effect. Much like his late father, Jason Miller (The Exorcist), Patric has a great ability to express a character's history with a simple facial expression while Liotta, a great actor whose career quieted down after 1990's Goodfellas, is back in top form here. The actor packed on about thirty pounds for the role, but he also packs on an equal amount of emotional weight to his character. This film doesn't have your typical good cop/bad cop scenario. We simply have two men who have tried to do the right thing but wound up only making matters worse for themselves in the long run.
Narc is many things: a great cop thriller, a welcome return to form for Ray Liotta and one hell of a calling card for Joe Carnahan. It will be quite interesting to see what he does for an encore.
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