cowboyandvampire

This series was a lot of fun-like, yelling at the TV fun. But seriously, give Electra her own series. She was the best part of a good show.

Detective Jim Wilson is a good cop mired in a bad world of hustlers and pimps and crooks. He has a black and white sense of right and wrong, but he's trapped in infinite shades of gray — a garbage handler, as he self-identifies, who spends his days and nights thankfully cleaning up the trash on the mean streets. He's got pencil-pushing bureaucrats breathing down his neck, and every dame who crosses his path has angle. But he gets things done, he rights wrongs, usually by beating bad guys into submission. In other words, he is an archetype for every bad man on a good mission and this movie is a blue print for every renegade copy movie ever made thereafter.

And as is this case in almost every one of those cop movies thereafter, the world is quickly changing around him and in the new world, you can't solve all your problems with your fists — or, as in more modern movies, with a gun. (Side note: apparently things don't change too quickly much because this story line is still alive and well.) After a particularly brutal scene in which the sympathetic, sadistic cop beats a confession out of a craven, seemingly masochistic criminal, he draws the ire of his commanding officer who sends him upstate to a rural area gripped in an icy winter. A girl has been murdered and the locals, especially the father, aim to settle the score. Everything in his gritty, urban background has readied him to dole out some sympathetic justice, but there's just one problem — in the course of the investigation, he meets a dame without an angle: the beautiful, and blind, Mary Malden (played by Ida Lupino).

Her mentally challenged brother is a suspect and Jim and the victim's father are forced wait out the night at Mary's house. For a man who has seen too much and trusts no one, he can't help but fall for the lovely Mary who has can't see anything and is forced to, as she admits, trust everyone.

More modern sensibilities are used to (numbed by?) a direct visual treatment of passion, but the muted approach in this movie heightens the impact. When their hands touch, we are treated to a moment of romantic discovery that surpasses all the heat and energy of the currently more popular bra and pantie clad tussling between love interests.

The movie is shot in a jumpy, jerky way (mumblenoir?) with crackling dialog, adds to the tension, sense of foreboding and drama. And the car chase — sliding along icy roads — was well-executed. For such a short movie (82 minutes), it covers a lot of territory — from the heart of the city to the emptiness of the wilderness, and from cynical resignation and brutality to hope and redemption.

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What makes us special? Not much, really, especially in the world created in this movie. Michael Rapaport plays Les, a down-on-his luck meter maid (what's the male equivalent of a male maid? A meter dude?) stuck in a dead end life. He's single, lonely, eating gross microwave food and reading a lot of comic books. (That last part got a serious, sideways and long-suffering look from Kathleen.) What guy can't relate? The world Les lives in, and the real world, is bleak. That's why he, and many of us, seek escape in movies and comic books that allow us take part in the hero's journey vicariously. Les is lonely and sadder than most, so he signs up for a clinical trial to test a drug he thinks will give him superpowers. When he starts to manifest powers, he uses them to try and fight crime. But it's highly likely the powers are manifesting only in his mind as the drugs may be forcing a psychotic break.

The movie pits him against a nasty pharmaceutical company and his own demons. What we learn along the way is that the world doesn't need superheroes, we just need people willing to act like superheroes. And as Les indicates early on, that means always getting back up, no matter what bad guys throw at you, or what life throws at you. From asteroids and laser beams to dead end jobs and emotional minefields associated with dating, true bravery is always just getting back up. And the hero's journey — though often spiffed up for cultural consumption — is really just continuing to trudge forward when every muscle fiber in your body screams to give up.

A couple of things of note. First, clinical trials are not skeezy and there are many oversights and controls to prevent just such abuse. It makes for a fun movie, but outside of the big screen, they are closely monitored. Second, Alexandra Holden as Maggie, an intersecting love interest who is marginally differently-abled, was tremendous.

I greatly enjoyed this movie, and Rapaport, but I may have been conditioned to like it -- I cheerfully admit to reading way to many comics (like Elephantmen and The Boys).

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