It’s appropriate to begin with a confession. After all, there’s a major shortage of honesty among the characters in Cop Land, so someone’s got to take the lead.
My confession is that I don’t like Sylvester Stallone. Or at least I didn’t like him until I saw Cop Land. It seems that everyone but me loved Stallone in his many previous roles as a macho hero. Not me. The tough guy routine struck me as more an ego-trip than an attempt to laugh at the macho cliché. It just never worked for me.
And now, while some are not thrilled with Stallone’s Cop Land portrayal of the imperfect Sheriff Freddy Heflin, I found it absolutely riveting. Here’s a big, overweight lawman responsible for a New Jersey bedroom community populated primarily by New York City cops. Freddy is a second rate cop and he knows it. Deafness in one ear kept him from becoming a big city police officer.
More of a golf caddy than a sheriff, Freddy rips up tickets for drivers who have badges and generally keeps his head down, ignoring the corruption of the community’s leading cop, Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel). A traumatic event brings this corruption into the open, and Freddy needs to decide whether he has any principles left.
Cop Land is not pleasant. It gives the impression that every New York City police officer is crooked, and just about everyone else is either helpless or willing to go along with it. Whether or not this image is accurate, Cop Land is compelling, and its characters ring true. Keitel is at his scummy best. Robert De Niro is solid as an internal affairs investigator. But Stallone’s honest and human portrayal of a decent man who’s let too much go by makes this film work.
