ADFF 2011 Review: Rampart

How much can a mediocre movie be saved from an excellent lead performance? That’s the question one would ask after watching the crima drama ‘Rampart, which features an excellent career-best lead performance by Woody Harrelson and some dramatic sequences of note, but a weak screenplay and finnicky direction leads it astray.

The film follows a hard cop played by Woody Harrelson, who works in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division which is already scandalous for its corruption cases. As he manages to struggle with his personal life, he gets embroiled in a police brutality case and a murder case after that and his life begins to unravel both personally and professionally.

I’ve always believed that Harrelson is an extremely underrated actor who has shined in almost everything he’s been in whether as a small part or big, whether it’s comedy (Zombieland) or a hard-hitting drama. But he’s never gotten the recognition that he deserves and a film that he alone could really carry. ‘Rampart’ is his first chance to do a character-based drama that depends solely on his astounding performance. I just wish it was a better movie on its own.

The problem with the film is that it works with a weak script that lacks the dramatic punch that it’s trying to achieve. It’s definitely set in a real world basis with the Rampart police department actually being a corrupt one, but it fails to realize that  ‘corruption in LAPD’ movies have already been made quite a few times in Hollywood and done much better. To differentiate from them, one really needs a different hook or a quality film. Unfortunately, no such hook is to be found here. There aren’t that many surprises and the film is happy working in safe territory, with the cliches of a policeman’s separation and estranged children coming into play. Nothing much really happens throughout most of the movie and towards the end the scenes border on repititiveness, with most of the supporting characters never getting any sort of resolution.

Add to that some very questionable direction and it only makes things harder. Looking to mimic the natural handheld look that most dramas do, the director here overdoes the handheld with some very odd shots that take you away from the action. For example, the camera zooms way too close into the character’s faces for some reason during intense dialogue scenes and ends up being very jarring and distracting. There are a lot of editing issues with the film with the placement of some angles not capturing the essence of the scene at all.

What saves this from being a disaster is of course Harrelson’s multi-layered performance and the character itself. It’s appreciated that the writer decides to put a lot of shades of grey to the main character and makes him do some questionable acts yet still expect the audience to experience the film from his point of view. Most movies try to keep their protagonist as positive as they can and leave the negative shades to the villainous characters, but here the audience is really kept in doubt whether they should empathize with the sometimes manic behavior of the cop or not. But then again, the ending is extremely anti-climactic and doesn’t resolve most of the plot points that it set up itself.

‘Rampart’ is worth a look for excellent performances and some memorable scenes that stand out, but is unlikely to make a lot of splash during the awards circuit thanks to an underwhelming screenplay and weak direction.

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