Rampart (15)

HHH

Dir: Oren Moverman

With: Woody Harrelson, Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty

Running time: 108 minutes

IN Rampart, Woody Harrelson plays a cop so dirty you could put him through a car wash from now until New Year without making a start on his moral grubbiness.

We're back, once again, in that well-known cinematic territory that is the flawed cop drama. While the familiarity of the subject may induce more than a few yawns, Oren Moverman's picture contains such a firecracker performance from Harrelson it deserves to be on your "to see" list this week. Harrelson, the kid from Cheers, has been all grown up now for a long time, and here, working again with the director who sparked a similarly startling turn from him in The Messenger, he turns in one of his finest performances yet.

Harrelson plays LAPD officer Dave Brown, an anti-hero to some of his colleagues for the rough justice he dispenses. The incidents ascribed to Dave have become part of the myth that shrouds and protects him. Or at least it has so far.

To match his unconventional career path, Dave has a singular private life, with two daughters by half-sisters Catherine and Barbara (played by Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon, aka Miranda from Sex and the City). Being surrounded by women at home – the two families live in the same street with Dave flitting between them – ought to have a softening effect on him, but instead it bolsters his view of himself as the alpha male who must protect his females from a dangerous world.

To Dave's eyes, the part of LA he patrols is Hades on earth, a place where normal enforcement of law and order has been replaced by crowd control. "This is some emergency occupation, kid," he tells a newbie officer. "Emergency law."

Moverman stays on the go with Dave, the invisible observer riding shotgun in the patrol car, standing at his shoulder in a bar, sprinting alongside as the cop chases a suspect. The handheld style forces the viewer to become more intimate with Harrelson's character than we might otherwise choose. Being so up close and personal we are forced to make our own judgement, but Moverman doesn't make it so straightforward. There's the racist, sexist, bullying, scumbag Dave, the one that's easy to hate, but then there's the caring dad, the dispenser of frontier justice to bad guys, the sharp observer of those around him. Is he solely to blame for blame for his corrupt ways, or has he become tainted by the system around him?

The film takes its title from the real-life Rampart scandal involving corruption and other misconduct in the LAPD, which Moverman uses as a backdrop to Dave's story. With politicians and the media already demanding scalps, now is not the time for Dave to cause further uproar.

Moverman delivers a convincing picture of a police department that stands between warring politicians and bureaucrats (played by a cast that includes Sigourney Weaver and Steve Buscemi) and an alienated public. The machinations reek of the real deal, as they should, given the film comes from a story by James Ellroy and the script is co-written by him. Ellroy, author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, is to modern LA what Dickens was to Victorian London. He knows where its underbelly is, and just how to prod it.

The same intimacy is at work between Harrelson and Moverman. In their last film, The Messenger, the star of The People Versus Larry Flynt and No Country for Old Men played a veteran soldier sent to the doorsteps of families to deliver the worst kind of news about their sons and daughters serving overseas. Captain Stone was a man with towering failings, but compared to the rogue Harrelson plays in Rampart, he was Snow White.

Harrelson gives no quarter in his portrayal of Dave. He rips the bones from the part and spits out the leftovers. As Dave descends further into his very own underworld, the transformation in Harrelson becomes palpable. Sweating, flushed in face, eyes on stalks and veins in neck pumping, he looks like a man going under for the umpteenth occasion. But a born survivor, he is determined to come out on top one more time.

Once the film starts Dave on this journey, however, it doesn't know where else to go. The character just carries on circling the plughole of life. One expects more from Moverman, a writer who managed to put a fresh spin on Bob Dylan in the biopic I'm Not There. But where Dave goes, many other movies, most recently Bad Lieutenant, have been before. Even with the addition of local politics to the story, there are few surprises to be had as a film that started off being blisteringly inventive simply runs out of puff.

What is left to enjoy is Harrelson at his edgiest, surrounded by a cast, which includes Ned Beatty beside Buscemi and Weaver, similarly revelling in cutting loose.