NIGHT FALLS ON MANHATTAN (34)

Directed by: Sidney Lumet

Starring: Andy Garcia, Richard Dreyfuss, Lena Olin, Ian Holm

The Pitch: A cop's son rises to DA and has to deal with police corruption in New York City.

Theo Sez: Fascinatingly awful, so full of howlers it often strays into so-bad-it's-good territory - though it's finally a bit depressing, because its awfulness is like a terrible extension (and distortion) of Lumet's greatest virtues : his magnificent cynicism ("You want clean hands? Become a priest!") mutates, in this case, into a comical inability to write a convincingly idealistic hero, while his reputation for speed and efficiency translates into a film that seems to have been written in a day and shot entirely on the first take. Even the plotting is breathless, which is initially a good thing - plunging us straight into the action, an assistant DA delivering a world-weary speech to a new intake of trainees ("I know you're in it for the money, so don't give me any crap about Justice") - then increasingly less so as it becomes clear that Lumet isn't going to waste any time on bullshit subtleties like character shading and imaginative detail. Dreyfuss is the inevitable disillusioned 60s radical ("Sometimes I get so sick inside"), Olin the romantic interest (though her role seems mainly to consist of making scrambled eggs then simpering when our hero says "You make great eggs"), Garcia an unlikely Irish cop - his mother was Hispanic, apparently - and even more unlikely White Knight, shocked to the core of his being by police corruption. They all ham it up, as well they might in a film so sloppy and perfunctory - a film where important revelations are divulged in a steam-room (pathetic fallacy, geddit?), where hospitalised fathers and visiting sons bond over a childhood catchphrase ("Nail it, son"), where the quickest way to a gangsta's wrath is to diss his sneakers ; and all the time, frustratingly, you can just about see the film it might've been - if only in the constant echoes of Q +A or PRINCE OF THE CITY. Worth seeing for the lively detail - squabbling cops, dozy judges, schizophrenic clients - in the first half-hour ; though stuff like Ian Holm's approximately five-stage rendition of Man Receiving Bad News Over The Phone also has its unfortunate attraction.