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Hollywood Homicide

Hollywood Homicide

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $17.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: NOT ALL IT WAS HYPED UP TO BE
Review: TWO COPS [HARRISON FORD AND JOSH HARTNETT] INVESTIGATE A MURDER. WELL, THE PROBLEM WITH THIS MOVIE IS THAT IT WAS A LITTLE TOO SLOW MOVING. HARRISON FORD IS STILL COOL, BUT THE FILM DOES LACK SUBSTANCE AT TIMES. LET ME JUST SAY THIS, THE FILM WAS TOO SLOW, TOO LONG, AND IT WAS JUST FILLED WITH TOO MANY POINTLESS SUB-PLOTS. I THINK IF HARRISON FORD WASN'T IN THIS MOVIE, I SERIOUSLY THINK THIS MOVIE WOULD'VE BEEN ONE OF THE WORST MOVIES OF THIS YEAR. THOUGH IT AIN'T THE WORST MOVIE YOU COULD POSSIBLY RENT OR BUY, THERE WAS A LOT OF OTHER ACTION MOVIES THAT CAME OUT THIS YEAR THAT WAS MUCH BETTER THAN THIS ONE. LORD HELP ME IF THEY EVER DO MAKE A SEQUEL TO THIS MOVIE!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: so so so so so so bad
Review: I love you Harrison - but this was the worst, most packaged, ill-concieved piece of stinky trash I have ever wasted my time on. So bad.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: impressed
Review: very impressed with the action and plot. Awesome music. The car chase in this movie is one of the best ever. If you like great car chases and a very whitey plot you will like this move. You will also be suprised by the chemistry between Josh and Harrison.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Hollywood Homicide
Review: Great movie! Fun and entertaining! Great music and story plot.
Josh Hartnett and Harrison Ford did an outstanding job. One of the best movies last summer!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Ford is at his best
Review: surely enough I enjoyed this buddy cop movie. Ford and his partner/wannabe actor/yoga teacher Hartnett investigate a murder at a local club. blending comedy and action in is great. Harrison Ford has never been cooler and funnier and Hartnett is great too. favorite scene is when Hartnett and Ford are in seperate rooms and they are interrigated and Hartnett is doing yoga and attracting the lady officer while in the other room Ford is going wacky. for fans of Ford or the handsome Hartnett and yes I think hes handsome, he has a face smoother than a babys bottom

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Even Ford Could'nt save this one
Review: A few (very few) laughs don't make this sort of serious, sort of not serious police drama any easier to get through. The writer and director build a plot with several subplots. Then, unable to resolve them in any sensible way, resort to a loooong, boring chase sequence, arrest all the bad guys and bail out of the movie. Not even worth renting. Sorry Harrison, you're the man but this is a turkey.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Dreck
Review: I suffered through this movie. It was billed as a comedy but neither myself nor any of the 4 people I watched it with cracked a giggle though the whole thing.
It was boring, the plot - well there really was no plot to speak of, the musical score was just junky characterless rap and the dialog was lame.
The car chase was a yawn, and I applauded the ending - it ended.

This movie is not even worth going into a description of it. Just skip it and save your money to see something decent.

I don't know what is going on with Harrison Ford lately but this should have been an embassment for him unless he was just trying to show is still cool to his new little girlfriend.

I was dissapointed that Bruce Greenwood and Martin Landau got roped into this nonsensical mess.

Sorry, this movie stunk.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Worth watching for Ford and Hartnett
Review: Hollywood Homicide isn't a great movie but Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett work well together. I also like how they live double lives. I mean Harrison Ford trys to sell houses to the people he questions about a murder or what not. Meanwhile Hartnett is a cop/actor/yoga instructor. He's just a cop to catch the person who killed his dad.

There's also a scene I like where Ford is trying to distract Hartnett so he doesn't stop 2 people from stealing his car so he can collect theft insuramce for it. Sure the script is brainless and silly but the actors make the best of it. If the movie was a drama I'm not sure Ford and Hartnett would be this fun together either.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Quite an enjoyable action/comedy.
Review: Hollywood Homicide had the misfortune of being released alongside bigger, "f/x" oriented blockbusters, so it unfortunately got lost in the box office shuffle of summer 2003, putting up some rather disappointing numbers. The reviews weren't kind (though a number of reliable critics, including Ebert & Roeper, Rob Blackwell, and David Cornelius gave it positive marks), so undoubtedly low expectations on my part made this a more enjoyable venture for me, or maybe it's just a solid action/comedy. Either way, this continues my personal Harrison Ford streak (dating back to Star Wars, there hasn't been a movie of his I've seen that I've genuinely disliked, not even the strictly mediocre Random Hearts).

Ford stars as Joe Gavilan, a Hollywood detective moonlighting as a real-estate broker who's desperate to sell a house just to pay off his mortgage and alimony payments. His partner, the much younger K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett), is also a yoga instructor/aspiring actor. Their latest case involves the murder of a group of rappers, a hit possibly called by producer Antoine Sartain (Isaiah Washington). But their attempts to solve the crime are hindered by an I.A. investigation led by Bennie Macko (Bruce Greenwood), an old rival of Gavilan's who's determined to make his life a living hell.

For about the first twenty minutes, Hollywood Homicide stumbles and sputters with awkwardly placed jokes involving food orders and real estate deals. But the randomness of the jokes and the situations improved and grew on me. It's part of the movie's appeal, basically focusing on two cops who have more pressing concerns on their minds than the homicide case they're on. As a matter of fact, the "main" plot is barely given any genuine development, it's just there to provide the movie with a frame with which the leads can interact and get into some physical action.

The movie's success lies mainly with leads Ford and Hartnett, who, surprisingly, aren't the typical mis-matched buddy pairing I was expecting (they actually get along pretty well). Ford's talent with comedy is not a surprise, his gruff manner and deadpan approach is perfect for this material. The running cell phone and real estate gag would normally feel out of place and probably fall flat, but in Ford's capbable hands, the gags are often hilarious. Hartnett is just right as the playboy movie star-wannabe, not exactly a stretch for the young actor, but still a decent performance.

Despite virtually no action in the opening hour, the movie climaxes with a twenty-minute, non-stop action sequence that's filled with car and foot chases, shootouts, and a couple of scuffles and fistfights. It's a thrilling segment that's easily the movie's highlight. There are several memorable comic setpieces: a chase involving a paddleboat, an I.A. interrogation constantly interrupted by cell phone calls, Ford chasing a villain with a girl's bike (actually my favorite scene of the whole film), Hartnett commandeering an SUV with a family of passengers still inside, and a bloodied Ford brandishing a gun and making the finishing touches on a real estate deal in an elevator full of frightened women. Incidentally, three of those scenes are set in the final half-hour, accompanying the action sequences.

Hollywood Homicide's not without its fair share of flaws. The film boasts one subplot too many, mainly in Ford's underdeveloped romance with a psychic (Lena Holin), Hartnett's acting goals, and a silly "father who was a cop, but was killed in the line of duty" cliche storyline that should have been completely excised. The Gavilan-Macko rivalry is lazily resolved, more of an afterthought on the filmmaker's part than an actual conclusion. One scene involving a handcuffed prisoner with a loaded gun is just pointless; I said before the movie's random storylines were part of its charm but this is a little too random.

But the movie succeeds at what it intends to be, a buddy-cop comedy where the cops actually feel like buddies and not hot-headed partners always at each other's throats over trivial matters. Such an approach may be what you're expecting, but believe me, the movie feels much fresher the way it is and is all the more enjoyable for that reason.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: As slow as a day in LA traffic.
Review: "Hollywood Homicide" is wit and sarcasm chugging on fumes, the first film Ron Shelton has ever written or directed that's lame on arrival -- even his last full writing/directing effort, "Play It To The Bone," had its moments of machismo goofiness. This time, the former sportswriter of "Bull Durham" and "Blaze" has strayed too far from his comfort zone and tried to craft a kind of Robert Altman-lite LA story of intersecting lives and Tinseltown truisms. Aside from star Harrison Ford's droll lead, which exists apart from the tangled freeway of plots and subplots, "Hollywood Homicide" fails in just about every way imaginable.

Ford is Joe Gavilan, a past-his-prime homicide investigator up to his salt-and-pepper shag in alimony payments to three ex-wives. Gavilan moonlights as a real estate agent; he's desperately trying to unload a house on Mt. Olympus while sparking a romance with a psychic (Lena Olin). Gavilan's partner is KC Calden (Josh Hartnett), a shaggy dog of a younger generation, who yearns, in the year's most unoriginal plot twist, to be an actor. Granted, that acting is such an unoriginal aspiration is part of Shelton's point, but satires of clichés aren't particularly original either. Calden's character is a double whammy.

But at least Hartnett plays a role. Shelton unwisely builds a giant bandwagon for his film for a series of walk-on "color" cameos that smash whatever driving narrative the movie could've hoped for. There's a cop in drag (Lou Diamond Phillips), a madam (Lolita Davidovich, a Shelton regular), an Internal Affairs cop (Bruce Greenwood, badly needing another JFK or Atom Egoyan role), the always-dependable Keith David as the "Sarge," Olin's psychic and Gladys Knight in a reasonable cameo as a former backup singer. And then there's Martin Landau in another worthless, call-it-in role that Martin Landau specializes in while he waits for another Academy Award nomination to fall his way. Landau, in this movie, is pretty much an embarrassment.

The "homicide" element of the plot is an afterthought -- four promising rappers are gunned down in a nightclub; unwisely, we're shown the villains, a record producer (Isisah Washington) and an ex-cop (Dwight Yoakam), well before the cops even investigate them, and a full hour before the Gavilan and Calden track down the key witness after an endless chase through the manure-filled waterways of Venice. Suspense is substituted for scenes of Davidovich making veiled threats and the ever-popular handcuffed-suspect-gets-the-cop-gun set piece in a parking lot.

The rest of "Hollywood Homicide" is a recycled farce -- trash borrowed from the excise bins on better cop movies, as if Shelton owned the rights to every discarded and misguided stereotype and plotline ever conceived.

Harrison Ford's movies have taken a beaten lately, critically and financially, but he still brings that Harrisonian aura to a picture; Ford's act is weathered and respectable -- he inches closer to that John Huston role in "Chinatown" with every job -- and Gavilan, as a guy who's had it up to here but expecting a little more, fits him nicely. Not quite so with Hartnett, painfully unconvincing with a badge -- there's fish out of water cases, and then there's KC Calden, who displays the crime-fighting capabilities of a high school security guard. The career he seems most fit for, yoga instructor, is merely his third calling in Shelton's grand opera.

Shelton is a skilled enough writer of the male ego that "Hollywood Homicide" does not unravel without a few laughs, but his murder plot is shockingly empty, and the movie's climactic chase, -- as long, if not longer, than "The Matrix Reloaded" wowser -- is simply too unbelievable to endure. The movie stumbles and bumbles to the finish line at well over two hours and immediately signs its card as a contender for worst summer movie of 2003.


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