Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had a film lecturer who took, for a time, a structuralist approach. The basic structuralist idea is that meaning is produced by concepts in binary opposition, so this lecturer had to find them in the relevant movie. To give himself time to think, I suspect (or perhaps because of his own preoccupations), he usually started with a binary opposition that applies to a lot of movies: ”It’s about …” he would hesitate thoughtfully, ”… it’s about youth versus age …”
Which certainly applies to the new cop thriller Hollywood Homicide, but more of youth versus age later. Hollywood Homicide is a perfect clone of the mid-1970s middle-rank movie — the kind of thing that was written by William Goldman and/or directed by Sydney Pollack. It’s solid mainstream entertainment with just enough individuality to lift it above the run-of-the-mill.
It is also intensely self-regarding, as the title hints. It is as much of an incestuous Los Angeles movie as, say, Steven Soderbergh’s essay on the movie industry, Full Frontal, or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, though Hollywood Homicide, being mainstream big-budget ”product”, of course tries to hide that fact.
Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett play a pair of police partners, their differences pointed up by the contrast in ages. Ford is the old codger with alimony troubles, moonlighting as a real-estate agent. Hartnett is the toothsome young buck who teaches yoga in his spare time and yearns to be on the silver screen. Such quirks give the characterisation what texture it possesses; these figures don’t so much have characters as characteristics.
They are investigating a bloody murder in a hip-hop club, and things spiral outward from there. You need know no more of the plot, which is somewhat too tightly wound, but it keeps things moving with a semblance of complexity. The terror of loose ends marks Hollywood Homicide as a classic-style Hollywood movie — at all costs, closure must be achieved. On the action front, there are a couple of good chases, one amusingly involving the canals of Venice Beach, the other a supercharged destruction-fest to top it all off.
Beyond that, there is little to say about it. Ford’s face, which seems to be expanding and contracting at the same time, is less embarrassing than his attempts at a sexy shimmy of a private dance. He is trying to be wry about ageing, and one feels some sympathy for the attempt, but starring alongside Hartnett doesn’t help. The constant jokes about sex amplify the gulf rather than narrow it. If part of what’s going on here is Hollywood’s senior brigade passing the baton to the younger up-and-comers, well and good — pass it on, I say.