Customer Reviews

L.A.P.D.: To Protect and to Serve

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From the opening credits, where LAPD police cars race down huge empty straightaway streets I was wondering where they found huge empty streets in LA in broad daylight. But still, I had high hopes; Dennis Hopper & Michael Madsen -- it's got to be worth watching, there's going to be some seething, twisted intensity somewhere.

Well, there wasn't...There was, however: cut-and-paste characters, all of them one-dimensional, all of them saying things that seem right out of other movies; a multitude of short, pointless scenes that don't add to the plot; some strange pre-adolescent ideas of how relationships work; and a 'surprise' ending that isn't.

This is a very amateurishly written and put-together little mishmash.

The story is: Good guy cop ("Steele" --just the name gives you some idea of how much thought went into this) in a new, tough division discovers all his new workmates are corrupt. Does he report them to internal affairs? Does he take the money and become one of the gang? Or does he think about it for just long enough to fill out a movie?

(choose #3...which includes a large number of hasty, moronic talks with his dad, Charles Durning, a retired cop who really shouldn't wear trousers with pleats).

Dennis Hopper as Captain of the division puts on a worried/angry expression and leaves it there. Michael Madsen who plays leader of the baddies is so relaxed--no matter what the scene may call for--that he seems to be relieved that he's paying off his credit card bill, or whatever bizarre reason he had to appear in a terrible film like this.

I think the filmmakers were trying for something like "The Choirboys" that had a good amount of comedy and camaraderie to lighten its drama and violence. Here, though, there's no comedy, the camaraderie is false, the drama is silly, the violence is gratuitous, the characters are laughably simplistically drawn, the plot is old and overused--and with nothing new brought to it.

You would expect an action movie with good stars like Hopper and Madsen to have something going for it...NOPE! This video is a serious letdown. The plot is amatuerish and hackneyed, the dialogue is pathetic, and the story on the whole is dissapointing and BORING!!DON'T waste your money on this piece of low budget trash like I did. Shame on Madsen and Hopper!!

One would think that movie with such an upbeat title would serve as a tribute to the law enforcers. This movie, however, continues to show the degenerate side of the law, what with more bad cops than you can shake a nightstick at. This movie is so one-sided though and lamely thrown together it does little more than confirm that there must be an awful lot of dishonest cops out there? Why doesn't someone make a movie about good cops? Oh, well, anyway this time around Marc Singer plays a second generation cop who finds himself on the wrong side of the law when he covers up for some of his more illicit buddies. Even the internal affairs head honcho is on the take. The bad guys are embodied by Michael Madsen and Wayne Crawford; Dennis Hopper is wasted in a small role as the seemingly dedicated captain; and Charles Durning makes an appearance as Singer's honest cop father. Steve Bacic rounds out the ensemble as the one true honest cop. The movie offers nothing new and if I were a member of the LAPD, I'd protest it.