Fruitvale Station (2013)

I cannot recall a more timely film in recent years. Seemingly every week in some U.S. city, police and vigilante pricks (Zimmerman) are gunning down unarmed black men at a clip not seen since … pre-1960? It just happened in Charlotte, and it’s the cold plot behind true story “Fruitvale Station.” We open with cell phone footage: 22-year-old Oscar Grant is shot point blank in the back New Year’s Day 2009 by a transit cop. He dies hours later. We then flashback to Oscar’s (Michael B. Jordon) final day as he desperately steers away from peddling drugs, works his way back into the graces of his girlfriend and daughter, and helps celebrate his mother’s (Octavia Spencer) birthday. It is she who suggests Oscar and his pals take the train that night. Writer/director Ryan Coogler’s drama is full of gut-puncher tragic moments like that, but also too syrupy scenes where Oscar plays chase with his tot in slo-mo magic hour light. The best moments come when they show Oscar as just a guy, any guy, struggling to correct course, thinking he has time, not knowing he does not. One day, maybe, films like this will be of the past. A-

Safe (2012)

Jason Statham does what Jason Statham does best in “Safe,” an action thriller that has our hero playing a haunted, homeless, lonely ex-policeman having a bad day as he slices, punches, kicks, stomps, and shoots his way through 100 gangsters, thugs, loons, and dirty cops. No shit seriously, some 200 people die in this film as Statham’s Luke Wright vows to safe a girl (Catherine Chan) enslaved to Chinese mobsters for her mad math skills, the Russian mobsters who want what’s in that brain (one way or another), and the corrupt cops who work for the highest bidder. In short, everyone in New York, even the mayor, is out to kill Wright. Most Breitbart fans will understand this as normal. I mean, foreigners, right? Look, director/writer Boaz Yakin (“Remember the Titans” must have been a fluke) knows we are not in this for the brains, but the blood. And much blood is spilt. Untold gallons. In the real world, the National Guard would have been called in after the first civilian massacre. Much less the fifth. But not here. This realm belongs to Statham. Take it or leave it, or die... C+

Freelancers (2012)

Former-drug-dealer-turned-rapper-turned-film-actor 50 Cent aka Curtis Jackson III puts the last of those multi-hyphenates to regrettable use in the awful “Freelancers,” a cops-gone-bad drama that thudded into cinemas and rolled over for dead on DVD within one month. Upfront mystery: How did Robert De Niro and Forrest Whitaker get wrangled into playing depraved NYPD detectives who trade in drugs, murders, and whores on an hourly basis? Jackson plays Malo, ex-crook turned policeman thrown into a corruption ring by his mentor/father figure (De Niro), the former partner of Malo’s real pop, another officer killed years ago. Not a single plot thread or revelation makes remote sense as Malo plays a ridiculous game between police and mafia while balancing several women on the side. Entire sections of this story seem cleaved out to fit a 90-minute running time as we dead end at a finale that has Malo crowing on top of a shit pile not only wholly implausible, but an insulting F.U. lobbed at all law enforcement. I can’t speak of his music, but as an actor here, Jackson has a blank stare reserved for album covers, punctuated by line readings so dull, he seems barely coherent. D-

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Nicolas Cage – the actor of “Wild at Heart” – has been missing for some time, replaced by a flaky, tired and boring stand-in in such garbage fare as “Bangkok Dangerous.” In the police thriller “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” Cage is once again thrillingly alive, electric, giving a high-wire act, and knocking every other player off to the sidelines. He drops out-there dialogue like “To the break of dawn!” with absolute relish, hitting every syllable in the strangest and darkest of ways.

This Werner Herzog-directed flick has nothing to do with Harvey Kietel’s 1992 flick “Bad Lieutenant,” except name and its general outline: A depraved, drug-addled police detective is on a fast train to hell as he investigates a disturbing crime. Here it’s the murder of a New Orleans family of illegal immigrants, apparently over drugs the caretaker was selling.

Cage’s Terence McDonagh is off the bat corrupt, but in a flash of kindness he saves an inmate from drowning in the 2005 Katrina floods. No good deed goes unpunished: Terence injures his back in the rescue. A doctor’s prescription of painkillers leads to hard drugs and so many crimes – blackmail, sexual assault, shakedowns and pointing guns at grannies. Let’s put it this way: Our hero has a “lucky crack pipe.” It’s telling of Terence’s flamed soul that his lowest point in the film is when his call girl lover (Eva Mendes) announces she’s going into rehab.

His back and shoulders hunched like a walking “7” and a gun shoved in his front belt like a calling card of a psychotic Western lawman of about 16, Cage hasn’t been this good in years: All big-eyes tender one minute with a baby and raging crazy the next, even scaring hardened gangsters. Cage’s eyes are glaring mad, and I’m not sure how he does it. I’m not sure I want to know. But the actor last seen in, I swear, 1997’s “Face/Off” is back. (For now. He is doing a “Ghost Rider 2” after all, a bunch of other garbage, too, God help us.)

This Herzog tale is dark as hell, grisly violent, and strange – David Lynch strange – but it’s also wickedly funny. Terence hallucinates creeping spying lizards, and as the film reaches its climax – well, let’s say, I’m not quite certain reality is all there. The ending, actually, is quite hysterical, if you can get past the horrible acts Terence commits. This might be a difficult film for some to stomach. I dug it. A brimstone comedy from hell. And the most exciting big-screen police thriller I’ve seen in ages, good news for a genre that has played it as safe as an episode of “Law & Order” for too long. New Orleans has never, to my knowledge, been this gritty onscreen before. This ain’t Bourbon Street fun and partying. It’s a third world country, where signs of mass death from a deadly storm are marked – literally – on nearly every home. A-

Serpico (1973)

The ultimate police corruption drama, “Serpico” is another winner from the late Sidney Lumet, a director who never let flashy camera angles and high-jinks get in the way of an amazing story. And this tale, based of fact, is amazing. Newly minted NYC patrolman Frank Serpico quickly learns that Blue Blood is thicker than the red kind, and that an honest cop is the least trust worthy man on the job. Serpico is that honest cop. The film opens with Serpico being rushed to a hospital after being shot in the face at point-blank range. Fellow policeman relish the chance to see this guy six feet under. The rest of the film is a flashback as Serpico goes from joyful cop to a man hunted by his own brothers. The film’s pitch is not perfect: Early scenes with Frank’s family are scored to a painfully maudlin piece of music, but it’s a small sin in a deep and exciting flick. The once great Al Pacino plays Serpico, and his performance is among his greatest output – “The Godfather” films and “Dog Day Afternoon.” A