Rampart

Directed by Oren Moverman

(R)

***

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Woody Harrelson has created an antihero “of epic proportions and indiscretions,” said John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal. In a story co-written by novelist James Ellroy and set in 1999, Harrelson plays a racist, sexist, homophobic Los Angeles cop who’s trying to hold his life together after being captured on video beating a black motorist. Given that the character is “smoking, drinking, and not-eating himself to death”—and that he cohabits with two ex-wives who are sisters—Rampart is not a pretty picture. Still, “it earns our attention.” Director Oren Moverman chooses to capture the action with an “unhinged” shooting style that “echoes the increasingly unbalanced state of his central character, almost to a fault,” said Bilge Ebiri in New York. At times, you can’t even tell if the drama is all in the head of this dissolute cop. Still, Harrelson is “mesmerizing” throughout, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. Though he “vigorously transforms himself” into a despicable man, he finds a “kernel of humanity” deep inside the character that makes us care. “What is burned into the audience’s memory is a fascinating portrait of self-destruction.”