Hour three of the international staring contest...must...not...blink. Narc Rated R 102 minutes

Thursday, January 09, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Full Metal Critic: Narc fulfills desire for gritty cop drama

There hasn't been a gritty police drama out for a while now, and for those who have eagerly awaited one, Narc is for you.

There is violence. There is bloodshed. There are tortured, driven cops struggling with guilt. There are remorseless bad guys who open up on The Man with full-auto fire at the drop of a hat.

Jason Patric is former undercover Detroit Police Detective Nick Tellis, who left the force after he accidentally shot a pregnant woman while pursuing a drug suspect who thought nothing of injecting random passers-by with a bad batch of heroin. We see the bad memory in flashback, shot in the jumpy camera style of "Cops" that only adds to the realism. He's understandably haunted by the incident. If Patric looks familiar in the role, think back to 1991's Rush, in which he joined with Jennifer Jason Leigh in another narcotics cops-on-the-edge role.

Police brass (including a put-upon captain played by Chi McBride of "Boston Public" fame) ask Tellis to come back to work to solve the murder of another undercover drug cop, Michael Calvess. At first he refuses. But the captain has promised him that if he closes the case, he can be reappointed to the force and get a desk in a detective unit. Since he's finding it hard to live on his three-quarters disability pension, he agrees.

So Tellis looks at the file, and he meets Detective Lt. Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), Calvess' partner and a man obsessed with finding the people responsible. He's the type of cop who doesn't care about breaking all the rules to track down the suspects, a fact we learn when he says he's willing to break all the rules to track down the suspects.

But Tellis has an advantage that Oak doesn't: He's worked the streets, met the thugs and knows his way around. He can reason with suspects, not just beat them up, like his new partner. And Oak needs Tellis' expertise to catch his suspects. So after the initial skepticism wears off (Oak thinks Tellis is an internal affairs mole at first), they start working well together.

They follow leads from a suspect who lighted his wife's hair on fire, to a three-week-old dead guy in a bathtub who apparently used a loaded shotgun as a bong. But here's the rub: It's a Mossberg police tactical shotgun, stolen from the department. Things are starting to look bad for Calvess.

And things aren't going to well for Tellis either. After he gets shot while tossing a suspect's apartment, his wife says she's going to leave him. Under other circumstances, this might cause an officer to give up the case to save his family. But Tellis is on the scent now, and nothing matters but finding the truth.

While the police brass think two suspects who are in custody are the culprits, Tellis and Oak know better. They come across two heavily armed thugs who say Calvess was a junkie who supplied them with police identification, guns and other goodies from the department in exchange for drugs. Oak doesn't want to believe it, but Tellis is starting to think it's true. And a Reservoir Dogs-style interrogation develops that may actually lead to the truth. Here's a hint: You won't know what happened until the very end.

Narc has all the elements of a gritty police drama, and reminds us that no matter how much "Third Watch," "NYPD Blue" or "Boomtown" we watch, there will always be harder-edged and more realistic cop dramas out there to show us what things on the job can really be like, at least in the imaginations of Hollywood.