Exiled

I admit, having two hours to kill on a winter afternoon puts you in the mood to curl up with a blanket and watch a good crime drama. "Exiled" has its high points, but unless you're an enormous fan of Mike Logan (and I know lots of people that are) this one isn't going to tempt your taste buds much. It follows his "exile" from Manhattan to the outer district, and his attempt through a homicide case to get back into the big leagues, with run-ins with former associates along the way.

Having seen many, many L&O episodes, enough to know the characters pretty well, I felt a lot of them were spot on. Logan's relationship with Lennie seemed plausible after the time the two spent together. I also wasn't nearly as disapproving of his scene with McCoy as others have been -- I felt Jack was the same as usual, a little frustrated with being bullied and not terribly pleased to see Logan again. The hatred Van Buren seemed to have for him was off, but I have to say the bright moments in the script are woven between the regular L&O gang (namely Lennie and Jack's three and a half minute appearance in a mental arm wrestle against Logan's demands that a task force be put into place to solve a crime) and the sadder situations ... a scene close to the end dealing with the crooked cop angle.

It wasn't a total waste of time, but nothing I would go to any lengths to see again.

A few years after Chris Noth left the cast of Law & Order on television, he and Charles Kipps came up with the idea of a television special to reunite him with his audience. Chris is in a precinct in Staten Island, under the jurisdiction of Dabney Coleman, and with Dana Eskelson as a partner. He desperately wants to get back to his old territory, so he fudges the details of a homicide so he can crack the case and earn a transfer.

The opening credits will reassure you that all the Law & Order cast members you know and love join Chris Noth in the movie, but in reality, they have glorified cameos. Jerry Orbach has maybe eight minutes on screen, Sam Waterston and S. Epatha Merkerson probably have five minutes each, and Benjamin Bratt has less than two minutes. But it's still fun to see them—it wouldn't be Exiled: A Law and Order Movie without them! If you love the series—really, who doesn't?—you'll probably want to watch this TV movie. It's extremely similar to the episodes, minus the absence of any courtroom scenes. There's a murder, colorful suspects, snappy banter, and a few one-liners that make you groan and chuckle at the same time.

It's possible that when Chris Noth did Exiled he might have had some hopes of making Mike Logan the lead character of another police detective series maybe based in Staten Island. Of course his motivation for making a thorough going investigation of a prostitute murder which I can tell you most cops anywhere let alone New York City wouldn't have given five seconds of attention to that kind of homicide, was to get back to New York. And no doubt he feels the work will get him back to Manhattan where the action is.

Anyway the Law And Order cast of 1998 all got into the made for TV film including Dann Florek working the organized crime division before going to sex crimes for Law And Order: Special Victims. Even Ice-T gets into this film playing a pimp who looks real good for the prostitute murder until he gets killed. This all being way before he became better known as Detective Finn Tutuola in Special Victims.

Noth is doing his commuter thing on his way to work in Staten Island when he notices a female body wash up where the ferry is docking. It's a homicide and he asks his supervisor Dabney Coleman for the case. Anything better than breaking up bar fights which they do a lot of on Staten Island. He even gets Detective Dana Eskelson to help him out.

Exiled is a nicely constructed film, maybe too nicely constructed. By coincidence the story takes us to his old precinct which brings in all the familiar Law And Order regulars. It also serendipitously does go back to Staten Island to a noted crime family with Don Tony Musante and his mutant son Costas Mandylor. And as it turns out Eskelson happens to know the family, she and Mandylor grew up together.

It could have been a pilot for another Law And Order spin off, but things didn't work out that way for Chris Noth. He had to wait several more years to get back to Manhattan in Law And Order: Criminal Intent. Noth is now retired from the NYPD, but I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Logan surfaces as a private eye in another film or TV series. Noth goes back to him like Yul Brynner went back to The King And I.

If you can buy all the coincidences Exiled is not a bad film and it sure has a built in audience with all the Law And Order fans.

Law & Order fans will appreciate the return of Chris Noth to the setting, and also the slightly longer look at New York City, which obviously cannot be caught in the pacing of a regular episode. The film does seem to attempt to crowd in a few too many Law & Order characters from the period and the years previous to it, and sometimes the pacing is a little slow. Dana Eskelson is adorable as a Logan's partner, a detective who grew up around the Uzielli crime family, and takes this and her status as a woman on the force to mean she has something to prove. Ice-T is hilarious as an absurdly named pimp, but Nicole Ari Parker's performance as victim's sister and Logan's love interest is lackluster and unconvincing. All in all, this movie is not a waste of your time, if you are a Law & Order junkie like the rest of us.

All right, all right, I was ecstatic as the next L&O junkie when I heard that Chris Noth would reprise his role as Mike Logan. I looked forward to this movie for months, lying to every friend, family member, and creditor I have that I was absolutely, positively, unavailable that particular Sunday night. I even told my roommate that he was going to have to live without the X-Files for 1 week.

Mulder and Scully, you never looked so good.

It wasn't that this was a bad movie. It's that it took the easy way out in many cases, which is something Law and Order never does. It was a paint-by-numbers cop drama, and didn't try to be anything else.

I won't spoil the plot by pointing out the various pointless twists--let's just say that anyone with a nodding familiarity with the genre will see the ending a mile away. What really struck me was how hard the writers were trying to make this a "one-lone-cop-against-the-bureaucracy" story.

That might have worked with brand new characters, but we've all watched Mike Logan, Lennie Briscoe, Anita Van Buren, and Jack McCoy for years. We know how they're going to react to situations and to each other. Logan's difficulties with McCoy in this film are plausible--they were never all that friendly during their one year together. But his confrontation with Briscoe seems forced, and the mutual animosity with Van Buren is way out of left field. Logan risked his career for her at one point--over Briscoe's objections. So how exactly does she label him "self-absorbed"?

All in all, it left a bad taste in my mouth. The characters and the actors both deserved better.