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Hollywood Homicide (2003)
If you have just recently heard about Hollywood Homicide, you are not alone. With all of the hype and advertising surrounding the likes of The Matrix Reloaded and The Hulk, it is not unusual to miss out on the smaller openings such as this one, even if it does star big names such as Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett.
The premise of Hollywood Homicide is fairly straightforward, at first. Two cops, Joe Gavilan (Ford), a veteran detective of the LAPD, and his newly assigned partner K. C. Calden (Hartnett), somewhat of a rookie at the job, find themselves thrust in the midst of a high profile investigation involving the murder of an up and coming hip-hop band. Yet instead of focusing on fleshing out the main story of the movie, the writers decide to throw in several other subplots, and the result is a convoluted mess that is dull as it is unbelievable. First of all, every character is conveniently connected to each other through ex-girlfriends, old grudges or some previous associations. Then there is the second profession in which both of the leading characters have taken: Gavilan dabbles in selling real estate while Calden teaches yoga and dreams of being an actor. The running gag of Gavilan's cell phone ringing non-stop as he goes through the day, looking for a break in his big case, is tiresome and annoying. Don't get me started on the hokey internal affairs inquiry into Gavilan and his finances, it is poorly conceived, unnecessary, and absolutely ridiculous.
Another of the most glaring problems to Hollywood Homicide is that neither Harrison Ford nor Josh Hartnett is known as comedic actors, so one would think that their charisma alone should be enough for the buddy cop formula to work. Suffice to say I was very disappointed, there was no chemistry between them to speak of. Ford's portrayal of Gavilan is embarrassingly awful, that not since his role of Quinn Harris in Six Days, Seven Nights have I been so bored by his performance. Hartnett's Calden is equally a disaster, lacking all the gusto he had in Black Hawk Down, which makes me question all over again what is everybody seeing in him beyond the pretty boy look. The supporting cast is criminally underused in bit parts that are uninteresting and badly written.
Had Hollywood Homicide been a satire about the police force, maybe I would have had more of an appreciation for the movie. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case here. Thus we were left with two individuals that want nothing to do with being cops, and since they dislike the job so much, you can well imagine how painful it was for the audiences to watch them doing something they are really terrible at. However, the aforementioned problems could have been overlooked if the film at least gave us some action to distract us from the paper-thin characters, but somehow it managed to botch the attempt. The only action scene to speak of came in the last twenty minutes of the picture, and the chase sequence was shoddily edited as well as anticlimactic. In the end, Hollywood Homicide was a bore and a chore of an experience. It is neither funny nor exciting, and there is almost no redeeming quality to the movie. What a waste of a talented cast.
- Zalasta
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