| "One Tough Cop"
By Andrew Curry
The Miami Herald
Weekend section,
Friday, October 9, 1998
The title says it all. Bo Dietl is one tough cop, the kind
of character we've see in a thousand TV dramas and true-crime flicks. A
brave cop on the beat, street-wise, savvy -- and superior in every way
to his pencil-pushing bosses in the station house.
And that's exactly the problem. "One Tough Cop," directed
by Brazilian Bruno Barreto and ``inspired by'' the life of 25-year New
York Police Department veteran Bo Dietl (played by buff, gruff Stephen
Baldwin), is well-made and well-acted, but ultimately the film runs over
ground too well-traveled to capture our interest.
Dietl has had a tough life -- he grew up in a bad part
of town, has a mob lieutenant ( "Brothers McMullen's" Mike McGlone) for
a best friend, his best friend's moll (Gina Gershon) for a love interest
and a dangerously unstable drunk (Chris Penn) for a partner.
Then, there are the good guys: The FBI wants him to plant
a bug in his mobster buddy's car, his boss at the station house won't cut
him any slack and the detectives downtown steal the credit when he singlehandedly
cracks the city's biggest case, the brutal rape of a nun on
his beat.
Lucky for Dietl, he was born with a good sense of right
and wrong. His moral code should be familiar to even the casual
fan of the genre -- beating up bad guys (be they cop or crook) equals
good, ratting out friends (cop or crook) equals bad.
The real Dietl was a highly decorated cop in New York until
his early retirement in 1985. Dietl did solve the case the movie revolves
around; how much of the rest is true is anyone's guess.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter. Baldwin, Penn
and McGlone do credible jobs playing tough-guy roles that aren't
stretches for any of them. Barreto does a good job of keeping the pace
ofthe movie rolling. And we'll take it on faith that the movie's true-life
hero was a cop tough enough to earn the movie's title.
But his character is too familiar. As for the plot, way
too many others simply got there first. Except for plenty of profanity,
there's nothing in One Tough Cop you can't get from watching a few NYPD
Blue reruns.
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