Cop Land

Cop Land
Cop Land promotional poster
Directed by	James Mangold
Written by	James Mangold
Starring	Sylvester Stallone Harvey Keitel Ray Liotta Robert De Niro Robert Patrick Janeane Garofalo Peter Berg Annabella Sciorra Michael Rapaport John Spencer Arthur J. Nascarella
Edited by	Craig McKay
Music by	Howard Shore
Distributed by	Miramax Films
Release date	August 15, 1997 (U.S. release)
Running time	104 min (original) 116 min (director's cut)
Language	English
Budget	$15,000,000

Cop Land is a 1997 American drama film written and directed by James Mangold with an ensemble cast featuring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Robert Patrick, Peter Berg, and Michael Rapaport.

Plot

In the fictional town of Garrison, New Jersey, located across the Hudson River from New York near the George Washington Bridge, a large number of residents are New York City Police Department officers.

Murray 'Superboy' Babitch (Michael Rapaport), Lt. Ray Donlan's (Harvey Keitel) nephew, gets sideswiped on George Washington Bridge by a couple of African-American teens. Thinking that they had fired a gun at him, he returns fire with a 9mm Glock 19 pistol and they are killed in an ensuing crash. Worried about a possible racial incident, Ray decides the best solution is to fake Superboy's death by suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. When another corrupt cop Jack Rucker (Robert Patrick) is caught red-handed trying to plant a MAC-10 on one of the deceased motorists to justify the shooting, their fellow corrupt cops (John Spencer and Arthur J. Nascarella) fear Superboy will testify to internal affairs about police corruption.

Smelling a cover-up in Superboy's "death", IA investigator Moe Tilden (Robert De Niro) asks Sheriff Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone) of Garrison, NJ to provide internal affairs with information on the corrupt cops. Even though they are corrupt and work in a different city, Freddy views them as allies and brothers, able to accomplish what he could not. His reluctance to betray his friends derails the investigation.

Although the cover up at first seems successful, Ray is told by his PDA President Vincent Lassaro (Frank Vincent) that without a body, the case will not stay dead. Ray reluctantly decides that Superboy should be killed. However, they botch the job (Superboy was tipped off by Ray's wife and was prepared for the ambush) and in doing so reveal to Freddy that Superboy is actually alive. Freddy is forced to confront the truth about his friends and try to bring them to justice. When he realizes his error he returns to Moe seeking help, but rejects his plea. Freddy steals several NYPD files on the cases when he is leaving the office. He goes back to his office to look at the files, and realizes the men he knows are all connected to corruption. He returns home to find Gary 'Figgsy' Figgis (Ray Liotta) packing to leave, and admonishes him for abandoning him.

Freddy deduces from investigating that Figgsy was right about Garrison being a town owned by the mafia. Freddy tells his deputies about his discovery. They react with alarm at the extra-legal sources (stealing case files) on which his ad-hoc investigation is based. Deputy Cindy Betts (Janeane Garofalo) tells Freddy she is leaving the department, due to the criminality on all sides. Heflin goes back to Figgsy's house to see if it was a cover-up when Figgsy arrives. Figgsy admits that he burned his house down on purpose, accidentally causing the death of his girlfriend.

Following up on the leads he talks to Rose Donlan (Cathy Moriarty) who gives him Superboy's location. Freddy finds him and takes him to jail, where his second deputy Bill (Noah Emmerich) abandons him in fear that the corrupt cops will come to take Superboy by force. Now alone, Freddy attempts to take Superboy to New York to turn in to Moe, but is ambushed by Jack (who blows out Freddy's good eardrum with a 9mm Glock 19 pistol) and Frank Lagonda, who take Superboy.

The film's climax involves Freddy staggering, with very little hearing, through Garrison knowing they have taken Superboy to Ray's house. A shootout follows, and Freddy is shot in the back of his shoulder and is saved from potential death when Figgsy arrives, having had a change of heart. The two gradually kill all of the corrupt cops in the house and recover Superboy. They successfully take him to New York, where Moe accepts Superboy into custody, giving Freddy all of the credit for bringing him in. The film ends with Freddy overlooking the city of New York from across the river with news crews reporting that several indictments have been handed down to mob members, the officers in Garrison, and the PDA all being investigated for their various connections.

Cast

• Sylvester Stallone as Sheriff Freddy Heflin, the mild mannered, hearing-impaired sheriff of Garrison who admires his friends who are cops. Freddy had wanted to join the NYPD, but was rejected due to his injury. Although nominally the sheriff, Freddy's actual authority is limited to handling minor civil issues, and is treated with little regard by his "friends".
• Harvey Keitel as Lt. Ray Donlan, the head of the corrupt cops.
• Ray Liotta as Officer Gary "Figgsy" Figgis, a drug addicted NYPD officer who is a friend of Freddy's. Figgsy also has an ongoing rift with Joey, and is convinced his former partner was killed before he talked to Internal Affairs about Ray and his group.
• Robert De Niro as Lt. Moe Tilden, NYPD internal affairs officer investigating Mafia connected corruption amongst the officers living in Garrison. He sees Freddy as his only hope for a case against them.
• Peter Berg as Officer Joey Randone
• Janeane Garofalo as Deputy Cindy Betts, new deputy working alongside Heflin.
• Robert Patrick as Officer Jack Rucker
• Michael Rapaport as Officer Murray "Superboy" Babitch, Ray's cocky young nephew and rookie officer.
• Annabella Sciorra as Liz Randone
• Noah Emmerich as Deputy Bill Geisler
• Cathy Moriarty as Rose Donlan
• John Spencer as Officer Leo Crasky
• Frank Vincent as PDA President Vincent Lassaro
• Malik Yoba as Det. Carson
• Arthur J. Nascarella as Officer Frank Lagonda
• Edie Falco as Berta (Bomb Squad Agent)
• Victor Williams as Officer Russell
• Paul Calderon as Hector the Paramedic
• Debbie Harry as Delores
• Tony Sirico as Tony "Toy" Torillo (photo only)

Production

De Niro and Keitel had worked together on three previous films, Mean Streets in 1973, Taxi Driver in 1976 and Falling in Love in 1984. Due to the film's modest budget, all of the actors worked for scale. The entire main cast (with the exception of Robert Patrick), and most of the supporting cast and extras, were born or raised in New York City or the New York metropolitan area. Numerous supporting actors in Cop Land would later appear in The Sopranos, including Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco, Frank Vincent, Robert Patrick, Frank Pellegrino, John Ventimiglia, Robert John Burke, Arthur J. Nascarella, Bruce Altman, Janeane Garofalo, Paul Herman and Tony Sirico.

Two melancholy songs from Bruce Springsteen's 1980 album The River, "Drive All Night" and "Stolen Car", along with an effective Howard Shore score, help set the atmosphere.

The movie is based on Mangold's hometown Washingtonville, NY. He grew up in a development called Worly Heights, where many of the residents were NYPD.

Reception

Cop Land had its world premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on August 6, 1997. Some of the film's cast members attended, including Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Annabella Sciorra, Cathy Moriarty, and Michael Rapaport.

Stallone's understated performance against type—he gained considerable weight for the role—was praised by critics and he received the Best Actor award at the Stockholm International Film Festival. Cop Land was also screened at the 54th Venice Film Festival in the Midnight line-up. The film was accepted into the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but Miramax declined the invitation due to reshoots that were needed for the film, including footage of Stallone 40 pounds heavier.

Critical reaction was generally positive. Based on 59 reviews collected from notable publications by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an overall approval rating of 71%. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "There is a rough balance between how long a movie is, how deep it goes, and how much it can achieve. That balance is not found in Cop Land, and the result is too much movie for the running time". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin felt that "the strength of Cop Land is in its hard-edged, novelistic portraits, which pile up furiously during the film's dynamic opening scenes ... Yet if the price of Mangold's casting ambitions is a story that can't, finally, match its marquee value, that value is still inordinately strong. Everywhere the camera turns in this tense and volatile drama, it finds enough interest for a truckload of conventional Hollywood fare. Whatever its limitations, Cop Land has talent to burn". Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B-" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Stallone does a solid, occasionally winning job of going through the motions of shedding his stardom, but the wattage of his personality is turned way down—at times, it's turned down to neutral. And that pretty much describes Cop Land, too. Dense, meandering, ambitious yet jarringly pulpy, this tale of big-city corruption in small-town America has competence without mood or power—a design but not a vision". In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote, "With its redundancy of supporting characters, snarled subplots and poky pace, Cop Land really might have been better off trading the director for a traffic cop". Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers praised Stallone's performance: "His performance builds slowly but achieves a stunning payoff when Freddy decides to clean up his town ... Freddy awakes to his own potential, and it's exhilarating to watch the character and the actor revive in unison. Nearly down for the count in the movie ring, Stallone isn't just back in the fight. He's a winner". In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle also liked Stallone's work: "His transformation is more than a matter of weight. He looks spiritually beaten and terribly sad. He looks like a real person, not a cult-of-the-body film star, and he uses the opportunity to deliver his best performance in years".

Home video

Cop Land: Director's Cut was released to DVD in June 2004. Features include the original 112-minute cut, restoration of deleted scenes and scenes extended, addition of New York band Blue Öyster Cult's "Burnin' for You" to the soundtrack, and a new audio commentary with James Mangold, Sylvester Stallone, Robert Patrick and producer Cathy Konrad. Also included are a "Shootout Storyboard Sequence" and "The Making of an Urban Western" documentary.

On the DVD, there are two deleted scenes that primarily show the racism in the town of Garrison. One scene involves all the resident police officers chasing down a pair of black motorists and the other shows Heflin's deputy pointing out that the majority of the tickets issued in Garrison go to black motorists on charges that suggest racial profiling. The movie itself implies a racist undercurrent in Garrison as all the NYPD officers who live there are White, a black Internal Affairs Detective Carson implies that the cops who live in Garrison are racist to a black patrolman named Russell who is at the scene of the bridge shootout, a black couple who drives through Garrison are unjustly given a ticket by one of Heflin's deputies, and blacks are implied by the officers in different ways as "certain people" who are scared of Garrison and as an "outside element" that would present a crime problem to Garrison.

Legacy

Stallone stated on the Opie and Anthony Show in 2008 that the film "hurt" his career, and that he had trouble getting roles for eight years, due to the film's failure and the mix of views on whether he was leaving action movies for more character-driven content. Stallone has described this as "the beginning of the end, for about eight years".

The title of the film was later used as a title of a mission in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where the main character is voiced by Ray Liotta.

External links

• Cop Land at the Internet Movie Database
• Cop Land at the Rottentomatoes
• Cop Land at the Metacritic