Police Brutality

By J.C.

REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER

Directed by MILTON KATSELAS

Screenplay by ABBY MANN and ERNEST TIDYMAN

Among abundant absurdities, this film boasts two of the least likely chase scenes in screen history. One would have done nicely, but Report to the Commissioner is out to break records, not always deliberately. The first pursuit takes place down Broadway and adjacent side streets when one of New York's small army of street grotesques takes off after a taxicab. This particular fellow has no legs. He has to barrel through traffic on his little wheeled platform, propelling himself with his hands and hitching onto the rear bumpers of other vehicles for extra speed. The whole notion for such a sequence would seem like the creation of some furiously cynical screenwriter sneaking a practical joke over on his producer. The credit, however, must go to James Mills, author of the bestselling novel from which this movie has been extracted who actually used this scene as a centerpiece.

The second chase takes place along assorted rooftops and streets in midtown Manhattan. It features the spectacle of a bad guy (Tony King) bounding across the hoods of traffic-stalled taxicabs clad only in his trim-line boxer shorts. Even in New York City, this creates something of a stir, especially since the bad guy, who is black, is being pursued by a white good guy (Michael Moriarty), and both of them are armed. Hunter and hunted end up holding each other at bay in an elevator at Saks Fifth Avenue that has stopped between floors. While the cops surround the place, the good guy and the bad guy sweat it out, afraid equally of dying and of approaching the destiny of metaphorical brotherhood between races that the scenarists have laid out for them.

The movie is mostly about the corruption of a good young cop: how his idealism is twisted and turned against him. Done with the sort of street intelligence apparently alien to everyone involved with Report to the Commissioner, such a theme could have made a strong movie. As played--badly--by Michael Moriarty, Beauregard ("Bo") Lockley is less a cop of high principle than one of low IQ. With no perceptible help from Director Milton Katselas (Forty Carats), Moriarty cooks up a caricature of a sad-sack flatfoot, slow on the draw and even slower on wit. Although excuses are supplied for his presence on the force -- his father was a cop, but standards have slipped since the old days -- Moriarty overplays Bo so desperately that it seems unlikely he could have remained a policeman even in the worst of times.

There is a good, nasty performance by Hector Elizondo as an ambitious police captain, a characterization richer than this movie knows how to use. A great deal of time is also spent on the exploits of an undercover woman called Patty Butler, for no other reason than to tie a couple of knots in the plot. She is played by a model-turned-actress named Susan Blakely, who should not be encouraged.

J.C.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.