This LA crime thriller from 2001, written by David Ayer and directed by Antoine Fuqua and with cameos from Eva Mendes, Macy Gray, Snoop Dogg and Terry Crews, is as superbly watchable as ever; it is as instantly and horribly addictive as the PCP that Denzel Washington’s imperiously corrupt cop makes his rookie underling Ethan Hawke smoke on the job as a grisly initiation ceremony. A true narcotics cop is a drug connoisseur, he tells him with a grin, all part of imposing your personality on the streets.
When I saw this on first release I think was wary of a certain self-consciousness in Washington’s Oscar-winning performance as an LAPD officer radioactive with his own psychopathic corruption and conceit. I also ungenerously found fault with a certain final coincidence. In fact, the self-awareness of Washington’s performance – as crafted and mannered as Olivier playing Mr Puff at the Old Vic – is a part of how mesmeric it is, and that final heartstopping twist is a glorious showstopper from Ayer, the screenwriter whose masterpiece this film is. Around the same time, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary had been finding a kind of breezy, intoxicating irony and cynicism in violence; Michael Mann revelled in the military discipline and organisation of cops and criminals; Abel Ferrara located a desperate vision of evil in his Bad Lieutenant smoking the crack he had confiscated. But Ayer and Fuqua were doing something more old-fashioned, more rooted in a (distant) belief in due process and crime not paying.
