The most shocking thing about this excellent film is that it portrayed minorities as threatening, cold-blooded and bereft of almost any morality--until the end, of course.
But more about that particular implausibility later.

Washington, quite simply, gives a tour de force performance as a smart, but not that smart, bad--but not quite all bad-- narc on the mean, balmy streets of LA. From the moment his Alonzo Harris appears on screen, he commands the attention of the audience as much as he commands the awe-struck obeisance of his neophyte sidekick, Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke).

This movie is essentially a modern morality play, with images of evil and power suggested in the blackness of Alonzo Harris's specially equipped Cadillac and his clothes--maybe even his skin color, considering that Hawke is white. The ancient, even biblical, archetype of good/evil--day/night is alive and well in this eminently watchable and captivating film.

Washington's Harris is both captivating and repulsive, and the logic he uses to off someone who is supposed to be his friend rings true in our own moral code, perhaps making us as morally confused as he is. It should come as no surprise that his moral code will sacrifice anything--even his own flesh and blood-- to save himself.

But, unlike Hawke's Hoyt, who is thoroughly good, but whom we see constantly torn between what's right and what's smart (kind of like us), Washington's character is one we want to believe has some extractable good, however perverted by the streets he has chosen to "protect."
Washington--and Hawke--are Everyman, and we are left with some hope for all that.

The only negative--if we are constantly using hard reality as a basis for evaluation--is the serendipitous way Hawke is spared by a previous, seemingly unrelated act of goodness and mercy. The message becomes a very distilled "Do good, because it can come in handy when you have a loaded shotgun placed
on your cheek in some thug's bathtub."
(And if fourteen year-olds look like that girl he saved, high school ain't what it was when I was there.) One also wonders why Harris didn't finish Hoyt off after thoroughly kicking his butt. Someone truly evil would have.

Harris' public meltdown in front of the very people he has bullied and manipulated for years (including an ignominious, but very symbolic, shot in the buttocks) is a far greater fall than his eventual marionette dance with a hail of bullets on a lonely LA street.

The crooked cop's demise is on a par with Lee J. Cobb's in On the Waterfront, when Brando comes out on top after the fight. If memory serves, Cobb suffered a similar fate in "Twelve Angry Men," proving perhaps that the ultimate indignity for evil lies in the "de-pantsing" of its power.

Bottom line: Forget the nitpicking and go see it. It's worth every penny. Don't take any children under 14 and keep telling yourself that real life is not really like this. Please don't let it be like this.


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older