Internal Affairs (1990)

Salute to Bad Cops Movie #8

Synopsis: Richard Gere plays a nasty, crooked cop. Jeez, what crawled up his ass?

Blurb From the VHS Jacket: “Dennis Peck knows his way around the law. He can launder money, run a scam, fix a bad rap. He can even, for the right price, arrange a murder. ‘Trust me,’ he says, ‘I’m a cop.’ Richard Gere is Peck and Andy Garcia is Raymond Avilla, the investigator determined to bring Peck to justice in this supercharged police thriller.”

What Did I Learn?: Richard Gere wants us to believe he is among the most virile of men, because he bangs nearly every woman in this movie, except for Garcia’s lesbian police partner.

You Might Like This Movie If: There’s a young hothead at your place of work and you want to know how to make him angry.

Really?: 1) After Peck shoots an associate in the head at point-blank range, I wonder if he’s going to have trouble convincing the ballistics investigators the wound came about from a shootout. 2) Let’s see...Peck has been wounded, and the cops are now looking for him. What better place for him to hide than his adversary’s apartment? Come on...

Rating: Internal Affairs is an ok (not bad, not great) police thriller. Gere provides a show-stealing performance as a sleazy police officer (Garcia, on the other hand, mostly walks through his part until it’s time for him to explode, at which point he wildly overacts), until the script turns him into some sort of weird psychopath mid-way though. And coming from a less Politically Correct time, Internal Affairs also traffics in a number of stereotypes, including the frumpy lesbian and the hot-headed Mexican-American.

Ok, one final complaint: at one point, Avilla beats up Peck, who later Pearl Harbours Avilla. Shouldn’t the movie have ended with a fistfight, so we would know which of the two is indeed the tougher cop? 6.5/10 stars.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099850/