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Buddy comedy 'Hollywood Homicide' dies a slow death
Josh Hartnett, Lena Olin and Harrison Ford in 'Hollywood Homicide'
Sidney Baldwin/ Columbia Pictures
Director: Ron Shelton.
Stars: Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Lena Olin.
MPAA rating: PG-13, for violence, sexual situations and language.
Because it strives to elucidate the lives of Los Angeles police partners, hopes percolate along the lines of "L.A. Confidential," "Mulholland Falls" and Joseph Wambaugh works such as "The New Centurions," "The Blue Knight" and "The Onion Field."
The problem isn't that "Hollywood Homicide" stresses lightness of tone but that in return for very few laughs and a general air of indifference, it sacrifices edge.
The details it underscores never feel organic. They're just half-hearted running jokes.
Joe Gavilan (Harrison Ford) and his babe magnet-neophyte partner K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett) don't much like their jobs.
To pay off three ex-wives and two children we never see -- and don't need to because of the predictable ways in which they'd be shown -- Joe moonlights as a Beverly Hills real estate agent, with three days to move the $6 million home of a film producer (Martin Laudau in one of the film's several cameos).
K.C. teaches yoga to trim, narcissistic women and is playing Stanley Kowalski on Friday in a showcase production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" for probably no pay before an audience of six or eight.
The partners' priority at a crime scene investigation is to order sandwiches. Joe will be finicky when his isn't right.
Such moments are the core of "Hollywood Homicide," but they give it a jokiness rather than a verisimilitude, and they don't accumulate sufficiently to offset the fact that an ongoing murder investigation is all but inconsequential.
At a crowded rap and hip-hop club in the opening scene, hired killers rub out most of a band of rappers.
While he tries to sell club owner Julius Armas (Master P) the producer's home, Joe effortlessly learns that recording mogul Antoine Sartain (Isaiah Washington) has been nailing talent who try to leave his label.
There's very little investigating; there are no other suspects. The screenplay co-written by Robert Souza and director Ron Shelton and Robert Souza barely tries to function as a mystery.
There's an internal investigation of Joe and K.C. by the prejudicial Lt. Benny Macko (Bruce Greenwood), which generates no momentum, an honest supervisor named Leon (Keith David), a dirty ex-cop Leroy Wasley (Dwight Yoakam) and a couple of sensuous women -- the Hollywood madam Cleo (Lolita Davidovich) and the radio psychic Ruby (Lena Olin).
You can mark time spotting cameos by Lou Diamond Phillips as an undercover-in-drag cop, Gladys Knight as a troubled boy's mother, plus Frank Sinatra Jr., Eric Idle, Smokey Robinson, Robert Wagner and honorary Hollywood mayor Johnny Grant.
But they're window dressing on a perfunctory and not very observant buddy cop comedy with one good throwaway line at the rap club crime scene: "No one saw anything."
The inevitable car chase scene goes so long, without generating excitement, it threatens to bump into the next showing of "Hollywood Homicide."
Over-40 audiences, the most egregiously under-served of audiences at multiplexes, have reason to expect more when the names Ford and Shelton surface on the same banner. Neither seems to have had his heart in this one.
