Dirty Reviews

Cuba Gooding Jr.'s effort to salvage his floundering career, torpedoed by a series of exceptionally bad choices after his Oscar win for JERRY MAGUIRE (1996), is a chip off the TRAINING DAY (2001) block that chronicles one day in the miserable life of two very bad L.A. cops. Armando Sancho (Clifton Collins Jr.) was a teenage gangbanger who, apparently pricked by the same scrap of conscience that makes him tend gently to his aging, infirm mother, graduated into undercover work for the LAPD. His partner, Salim Adel (Gooding) is a foulmouthed, skirt-chasing, unrepentant looking-out-for-number-one hustler. They're both scheduled to meet with the Internal Affairs division at 6 pm to discuss a recent shooting incident that left two gang members and an innocent old man dead. Sancho, who's literally haunted by a dead man's ghost, has secretly decided to spill everything he knows about police corruption, which will involve betraying both his partner and his boss, Captain Spain (Keith David), and will have far-reaching repercussions within the department. But first he has to get through the day, which starts with a crooked lieutenant (Cole Hauser) — who's never paid them the slightest attention in the past — offering a chance to score some big money. He hooks them up with major-league drug dealer Baine (Wyclef Jean), who's interested in forging a business relationship with the cops, and arranges for them to check out a hefty cache of evidence-room drugs. Sancho is suspicious, but Salim is blinded by the prospect of easy cash: "Today's the day," he crows. "We're on the come-up!" But it's downhill all the way from the moment Baine tells to kill a fledgling gang of rival drug dealers. The shadow of the Ramparts scandal, Jim Kouf's mordantly funny GANG-RELATED (1997) and the James Ellroy-penned DARK BLUE (2003) all hang over this desperate-to-shock slice of sleaze life written and directed by Chris Fisher. Fisher plays the escalating atrocities straight (even the J-horror stylings of the dead old man's ghost are clearly meant to be serious) without ever managing to make them convincing — even the stunningly downbeat ending smacks of sub-Tarantinoesque theatrics.