REVIEW - MCCANICK

Another dreary trawl through the tortured psyche of a lonely, bitter police officer, a derivative indie project with blandly respectable production values, offering a cast of eager C-listers the opportunity to binge on processed, nutrition-less leftovers from roles they've seen better actors do to much acclaim many times before. The frustrating thing, in retrospect, is how close McCanick comes to transcending that overpopulated underclass of DTV cop dramas. Its final, big revelation is telegraphed from the earliest scenes, identifiable merely by observing these characters and their situations for a second or so, as none of the above amounts to more than a few trite attributes. It's also an under-developed revelation, either not willing or not considering to delve a little deeper and uncover something really incendiary, something that might bewilder audiences, sure, but that's a small price to pay for giving your movie a purpose. What's worst, though, is what this plot development represents. In Daniel Noah's script, it's just one aspect of his protagonist's mental state, at least in how it's utilised, despite the fact that it defines just about everything he does or has done. Noah doesn't even realise the potential significance of what he's written, and that it ought to represent, in terms of the actual content displayed on screen, the propulsion for all that occurs, and how its contextual treatment influences and is influenced by that, not a hokey twist employed to tie the film's strings together at the last moment, most unsatisfactorily. Cast and crew participate in manufacturing an atmosphere of po-faced intensity that's just comical in service of such flimsy material. You'd think they were making Schindler's List by the way they carry on.