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Fleischer's The New Centurions is a model of composition, and there's Dennis Hopper's experience in Rebel Without a Cause for the snapshot of tribes on opposite sides of the law. Los Angeles harmonies, South and East, an electric-blue nocturne illuminated by gun blasts and red sirens. The sagacious LAPD veteran (Robert Duvall) knows the territory and the lingo, and understands that being a professional is "the best you can fucking do." His partner (Sean Penn) has little patience for long-term strategies, instead slugging unarmed suspects and punishing a chico with his own graffiti spray-can. ("A guardian of masculinity" in his own mind, the seasoned colleague offers a clearer view, "nothin' but a gangster.") Crips and Bloods, substitute families in a void. "I don't know about this jungle generation, homes." Policier clichés enlivened by Hopper's sense of aestheticized grunge, alive to the vibrancy of barrio bodies, gestures, rhythms, murals. One chase hurtles through rubbish-clogged streets and ends with an explosion by the Watts Towers, another moves from beach boardwalk via motorcycle to a scuffle in a bistro kitchen. A question of uniforms, "they're flying their colors, we're flying ours." An Eric Fischl-like flash of nudity during a crackdown embodies the overall interest in women, María Conchita Alonso as the local beauty can't compete with the vivid gallery of hairy sketches—Trinidad Silva's lethal chumminess, Glenn Plummer's gaze of desperation, Damon Wayans' humping pas de deux with an oversized toy bunny. The camera tilts down from the gleaming cityscape and slowly zooms on hoods striding toward battle à la The Wild Bunch, later it ascends from a darkened hillside sprawl pricked only by a helicopter's searchlight. Ferrara deranges things usefully in King of New York. With Randy Brooks, Don Cheadle, Grand L. Bush, Charles Walker, Rudy Ramos, Romeo De Lan, Gerardo Mejía, Sy Richardson, and Micole Mercurio.
--- Fernando F. Croce |