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Friday, June 13, 2003
'Hollywood Homicide' lineup is missing much-needed chemistry
Harrison Ford may be as big a star as there is in Hollywood, but he hasn't made a good movie in a decade, and after three stinkers in a row -- "Random Hearts," "What Lies Beneath" and last summer's "K-19: The Widowmaker" -- he desperately needs a hit.
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So his new movie, "Hollywood Homicide," is carefully designed to be just that. It's a wacky black comedy, it goes all out to be ingratiating and cute, and, for box-office assurance, it makes Ford share the marquee with a current heartthrob, Josh Hartnett.
As a result, the movie is likely to do much better at the turnstiles than his last three bombs. But it's still not very good: just one more achingly familiar, by-the-numbers buddy-cop movie, and not a particularly strong star vehicle for Ford.
He plays a financially hard-pressed LAPD detective teamed with a hunky, New Agey rookie (Hartnett). The joke is both cops moonlight: He's a hustling real-estate broker, his young partner is an aspiring actor actively looking for his big break.
The first half of the film is a quirky but relatively straightforward police procedural that has the pair -- with divided attention -- trying to solve the mass murder of a rap group, the last half is one long Keystone Kops chase through the streets of L.A.
Director Ron Shelton (coming off a better LAPD movie, February's "Dark Blue") makes a few scenes sparkle, there's a smooth performance by Lena Olin as a radio psychic, and cameraman Barry Peterson (who also shot "Dark Blue") makes evocative use of his dozens of L.A. locations.
But the film has little of the inspired humor Shelton brought to films such as "Bull Durham" and "Tin Cup," most of the large cast of supporting actors (Gladys Knight, Dwight Yoakam, Lou Diamond Phillips) fail to register, and that endless big-chase sequence is all cliched tedium.
Hartnett ("Pearl Harbor," "Black Hawk Down") is a pleasant-enough actor and has a certain self-deprecating charm, but he doesn't have much in the way of a personality and he doesn't spark any buddy chemistry with Ford.
Ford tries very hard to be eccentrically funny -- to the point of forced, slapsticky mugging -- but he looks terrible, his timing is way off and his character is so uptight, abrasive and unappealing that he makes miserable company.
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