Every so often, there is a movie that is lifted up from an otherwise mediocre state by a piece of acting that's so on-the-spot it renders the rest of the movie's faults immaterial, and lifts the film up from the dregs of mediocrity into the realm of the kind of superlative-peddling sound bites that festoon those pesky For-Your-Consideration full-pagers that should be popping up in the New York Times any minute now.
Rampart is not that movie.
Despite getting strong buzz from the festival crowds, this Los Angeles-set police drama starring an admittedly impressive Woody Harrelson as an embattled officer has only two speeds: slow and screeching halt. A ponderous character study of a broken but redeemable man, It's like Drive without the art-house weirdness, Training Day without a plot, and, at its most bizarre, a kind of weird mix of Fatal Attraction and a Chuck Palahniuk novel. The movie is all atmosphere and paranoia but little in the way of momentum, with strings of plots that seem to rear their heads now and again and the hint of something truly interesting that's about to happen and never does. This is, however, a cinematographer's dream: with so little going on, Rampart is generally content to linger on long, significant-looking and artfully-framed shots of its antihero chain smoking in his cruiser (if there's an angle of Harrison puffing away that doesn't go explored, I'll eat my hat).
At least, though, Harrelson looks good smoking them. Brooding behind a pair of aviators and those ubiquitous death sticks, his performance as a casually racist policeman named Dave Brown is so strong it occasionally breathes life into the movie at some of its more interesting moments, but there is very little context given for his character's existence. He seems to have dropped out of the sky with Vietnam flashbacks and a short temper, and once he beats a man up after a car crash he finds himself the scapegoat for the more widespread corruption of the LAPD.
