Word: cop
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...performance of such thorough excitement that the rest of the movie cannot compete with it. Except for a fine, low-key characterization by Peter Masterson as a dutiful station-house cop, Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Play It As It Lays) has cast the movie rather haphazardly, and his heavy direction encourages a sort of collective actors' hysteria. The writing is without much enterprise; in deed, why make another movie about a police chief at all? It would have been far more interesting to use the same material for a film about Wills - that is, both...
Hollywood works in artificial extremes. The sticky old westerns or cop movies were based on the assumption that America was full of a spirit of egalitarian community and open land, and that only the aberrant would want to muck things up. The garish new breed of police thrillers tells us that the U.S. drives all its citizens crazy, our cities are virtual insane asylums, and the only objective standard and reforming force is the power...
...made Serpico had a chance to rise above all this. They had a real-life hero: an honest cop who crusaded alone against corruption in the New York City Police Department, despite the physical peril and psychological pressure he suffered at the hands of his fellow policemen. Without wealth or influential contacts, Frank Serpico pushed his case against plainclothesmen on the take so far that it embarassed the Lindsay Administration and helped catalyze the Knapp Commission. His story could have given the lie to the current wave of police epics, and not only dramatized the ugliness of New York City...
Serpico was convinced that police were the true guardians of society, a secular breed of Jesuits. His one burning hope was to become a good cop; he loved the vigor and ingenuity which the work requires, but above all he wanted to serve the people of his precincts. Even when he discovered that the force was pitted with corruption--that almost the entire plainclothes division raked in protection money from gambling and whorehouses--he refused to let that recognition sink him. He never quit: he took his allegations before a series of Lindsay aides and deputy commissioners and finally broke...
...apart from the grip of the story and Al Pacino's soulful lead performance, Serpico is superficial, even heartless. The filmmakers have done no original investigations, and accept the reportage of Peter Maas as gospel. In their film, no other cop besides Serpico and an idealistic inspector are at all virtuous; Serpico's Ivy League associate, David Durk, is here preening and pompous, nothing like the dedicated, befuddled naif whom even Maas found sincere. And Lumet, Salt and Wexler never detail the reluctance of police higher-ups to listen to Serpico: New York City and police officials are cardboard figures...