Bad Cops in a Bad Town

Sylvester Stallone became an action icon of the 1980s based, in large part, due to his work in the Rocky and Rambo franchises. It’s wild, honestly, that both of those film series became icons of the action genre considering they both started out (with Rocky and First Blood) as dramatic films with only a few action elements scattered in. They were products of their era, the post-Vietnam era when Americans were still a little shell-shocked, recovering from what had happened and trying to see where to go next, and (in the case of Rocky) they just wanted something to feel good about. It wasn’t until later installments (the bombastic Rocky IV, the over the top Rambo films that ignored everything First Blood was trying to say) that the films became true action spectacles. And by then their fates were sealed.

What the shift towards action above all else lost, though, was the solid Stallone performance. The guy is a great dramatic actor. While he’s sometimes derided and mocked for his “mushmouth” delivery (due to paralysis of part of his face which was caused during complications when he was born and forceps severing a nerve), they also seem to ignore the solid performances the actor gives, time and again. Sure, he settled into the actor star performance and those parts don’t really push him. When given good material, though, the actor is able to really elevate himself and the movie around him.

Cop Land was only a mild success when it came out, garnering $63.7 Mil against its $15 Mil budget (an impressively small number considering how many stars were in this film). It came and went at the Box Office, making hardly a splash before it moved over to the shelves at Blockbuster. That’s actually where I found the film, with the movie coming around around the same time I first worked for the video franchise (back when their shelves were all VHS tapes and DVDs were only starting to trickle in). A few of my co-workers watched it (because Blockbuster employees watched everything) and they recommended it to me and, yeah, it was pretty good.

It’s easy to see why it didn’t pull in huge numbers at the Box Office. Despite the presence of Stallone, and a few action-blockbuster scenes, this film is a crime drama at its core, and a quiet one at that. People might have been expecting Stallone to play some kind of renegade cop, out to bring law to his lawless town, but the film is a far cry from that. It’s moody, it’s reserved, it takes the time to build its case as events very slowly spiral out of control. Sure, there are scenes of Stallone stalking his streets with a shotgun, but those only come at the end when all hell finally does break loose. Before all that he’s a guy sitting at a bar, trying to pretend that his town is peaceful and quiet and everything he wants it to be. It’s a film about denial and loss and trying to figure out where you belong. It’s a far cry from Rocky IV and Rambo III.

But then that was what Stallone wanted, being in a phase where he “retired” from action films (right up until his dramatic works didn’t take off and he had to go back to being an action star). This was the path less traveled for him and, in another reality, it would be the kinds of films that defined his body of work going forward. Just not in this reality, sadly, where we then got more Rocky and Rambo and, especially, a ton of unwanted Expendables films. But not anything quite like Cop Land again.

The film, written and directed by James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Knight and Day, The Wolverine, Logan), is centered on Sheriff Freddy Heflin (Stallone), who lives (and works) in Garrison, NJ. The town is just over the Washington bridge from New York City and, over the years, it’s become a haven for cops looking to get out of the city and find a life in the suburbs. They work in NYC but, through a quirk of the rules, can be residents of NJ as not actually have to live in the city proper. They’ve made Garrison into a slice of a better life, so they say, a “Cop Land” outside the laws of the city.

Heflin always wanted to be a cop, working in the city. However, when he witnessed (as a teenager) a car go flying off the bridge, he dove in and saved the driver in the car. It left him with permanent hearing damage in one ear which then disqualified him from service. But he could get elected at the sheriff and, not being part of the force meant that he had the perfect perspective (if he ever used it) to see what kind of shit the cops living in Garrison (but working in NYC) were getting up to in their quiet little “haven”. Especially when they try to cover up a crime and close the thin blue line around one of their own. Now it may only be Heflin who can actually bring justice to this lawless land.

Mangold has an affinity for westerns (as made obvious by his body of work) and, despite its modern setting and metropolitan setting, Cop Land feels very much like a western. You have the sheriff trying to figure out how far he wants to put his neck out to be the law of the land. You have the outlaws using the town as a haven. Garrison is made to feel like a one horse town despite its proximity to NYC. Mangold is able to get you to invest in a modern western, rooting for justice to come as the outlaws circle their wagons. It’s effective and investing.

It’s Stallone that really helps to sell it, of course. He gives a quiet performance, acting very put-upon and beat down in the role of Heflin. It’s a performance very far removed from John Rambo, unlike who he was playing in Cliffhanger and Demolition Man and Judge Dredd. Heflin is the opposite of all of them, a small man (in the body of big guy Stallone) who never quite figured out who he was supposed to be. What’s most impressive is that, despite his size, Stallone sells you on Heflin and never makes you doubt the man he’s playing. He’s invested in the role, marking one of Stallone’s best performances.

But then he also does have a veritable who’s who of 1990s actors working around him for this movie. Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Peter Berg, Robert Patrick, Michael Rapaport, Jeaneane Garofalo. If you saw anything in the 1990s you likely saw at least one of these actors in those works (and usually more). They were the famous faces and the big performances. And somehow Cop Land gets them all into this smaller movie, all playing character parts. I don’t know who had to sell their soul to get all these people in here, but damn was it worth it.

The fact that the film didn’t take off, though, sent Stallone back to the movies he was more comfortable with. The film did well for its small budget, but not to the level Stallone was hoping. He said, at the time, that it was actually a bad movie for his career as it made people think he’d gone past his prime, was on the way out. Instead of pursuing further works like this, movies that pushed his acting chops, Stallone fell back on franchises that worked (films like Rocky Balboa and 2008’s Rambo) and more over-the-top action fare. This film showed what could have been but, except for Cop Land, really never was, and I think we missed out on something great. This film is solid, but it’s the promise of what could have come next for the lead actor, and then didn’t, that really disappoints.