Hollywood Homicide

Revolution Studios presents a Ron Shelton production

Starring: Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett

Directed by: Ron Shelton

Rating: ***

Plot: After four rappers in a Hollywood dance club are slaughtered by two gun men, Joe (Harrison Ford) and his partner for 4 months Calden (Josh Hartnett) must solve the murder before they are fired for some random bull shit. Much pointless stuff and funny stuff and one the greatest chase scenes in years ensues.

Acting: Oh man Indie is back, well not really. Harrison Ford is just a bad ass, I love the guy. It does not matter what he is going I think he kicks ass. Not many people liked K-19 but I did! I will say this if the movie didn't have Harrison Ford in it, I believe it would have sucked. I really like Harrison in this cop role. He is bad ass but he doesn't play a bad ass, which is good. Something about this guy just gives off the vibe of cool. Through out the entire movie his character is relaxed and I had a feeling that Harrison Ford just did not really give a shit about the movie and just chilled, and this amazingly worked. Ford doesn't seem like a comedy type, but this man is funny. His timing is just great and he knows when to go nuts and I was loving it. His partner Hartnett actually does a good job here too. I loved this guy in Black Hawk Down one of the better war movies in the last decade. I didn't fully enjoy 40 Days and 40 Nights simply for the fact that his character couldn't have sex for 40 days and he was like dieing, this made no sense. In this movie he makes up for it. His character is really a great one. A cop who is a yoga teacher and also wants to be an actor. Hartnett does not over act it and he has a way of keeping your attention on him so Ford does not dominate the movie. For the other cast members, they did not do much so I can't say much for them.

Directing/Writing: This is for sure an LA movie. This movie gives true light to what Los Angeles is all about and this surprised me. Ford's character is an old cop, but not one of those bad ass cops, just an old LA cop. Hartnett totally had an LA character with the Yoga and wanting to be an actor thing. The one stand out LA piece was the fact that both characters are on cell phones for almost every scene in this movie! Towards the middle of the movie it actually started to piss me off until I understood they were basically making fun of the city itself, I LOVED THAT! So far you must be thinking, wow Andy must really have loved this movie, but why did he rate it like he did? I'll tell you why jack ass, this movie doesn't really actually become good until an hour goes by. Sure the set up of the characters is cool and I enjoyed it but there was way too much pointless bull shit in this movie that just doesn't work! First off they don't set up the bad guy at all, there are like two scenes with him standing around doing nothing and saying pointless crap. They also add this one character as Ford's girl friend who is a "psychic" ok I guess that was also suppose to be an LA joke too but it didn't lead anywhere. So if you break the movie apart the first half hour is good set up, but then the middle part of the movie is just all slow pointless nonsense. Then the end makes up for all of it. I hate spoiling movies so I will just generalize for you guys, its a long car chase that ends up on a foot chase and has Harrison Ford doing some of the funniest stuff I've seen all year I was crying I was laughing so hard. Great stuff, I might see it again, well if I something to busy myself through the first half.
 

Overall: The last 45 minutes are one hell of a thrill ride and I was loving every second of it. This movie is a mess but a brilliant mess. I kind of want to remake this movie in two years with the same actors but just work the first half of the script. But you work with what you got and this is a pretty fun movie, some bumps in the road but it takes where you want to go.