Dirty [DVD] [2006]

This has been done before in the Shield, but this film takes things up to another level. Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character is deeply unpleasant, but deeply unpleasant people do exist, otherwise there would be no evil in the world.

Clifton Collins Jr was terrific, playing a man going through a breakdown, disgusted by what he had done and what he had become and seeking redemption in a terrible way - by betraying his partner. The agony on his face, the ghosts that haunted him, the futile attempts to put a limit on the things his partner wanted to do made this a brilliant performance

The film was chaotic, held together only by its timeframe - 8am to 6pm, but that was symbolic of the lives of the two men and the other corrupt cops. Nothing made sense any more because the lines between good and evil and right and wrong had become totally non existent.

If you like The Shield, The Wire, or Homicide Life on the Streets, you'll like this.

I'm sure there's a good film under here somewhere, beneath all the racial epithets, the profanity, the noisy jump cut editing, the convoluted plot, the quasi day-of-the-dead symbolism, and the truly over-the-top performances by the two leads Cuba Gooding Junior and Clifton Collins Jnr. There's a lot of blood spilled, and guns drawn on the violence-laden Los Angeles streets in Dirty, but nothing is ever solved and the City seems to remain a place of hell and damnation.

Dirty is a nasty, gritty, and mean-spirited film, where viewers will have to suspend disbelief at much of what goes on. Part Training Day and part Crash, but with a baroque, music video edge. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Cuba Gooding Jr. makes a desperate leap to the bad side playing Salim Adel so loathsome he makes even the most evil screen character soft and cuddly.

Salim is a bad, bad man - he routinely harasses and humiliates white drivers in fancy cars who have gotten lost, and manually rapes a young Latino teenager with his finger. Reportedly based on the rampart scandal that rocked the LAPD a few years ago, dirty follows Salim and his loyal Mexican-American partner Armando Sancho (Clifton Collins Jr.) through an especially stressful day.

Sancho, a former gang member, is so haunted by the shooting of an innocent bystander at a crime scene. But Sancho and Salim are now both cops and they're being protected from prosecution by the low-down, rotten Captain Spain (Keith David) along with his shifty lieutenant (Cole Hauser).

When the lieutenant asks the partners to remove a bag of heroin from the evidence room as part of a scheme that could make everybody rich, Adel jumps at the opportunity while Sancho has misgivings. The problem is that with all his macho posturing, Adel isn't that bright, and he fails to see that Captain Spain is setting them up. Spain merely sees them as ex-gang members and murders, and ultimately expendable.

The rest of the plot is rather convoluted, as various gang members are introduced and the two protagonists become involved in turf war between rival drug rings and have to shoot - and shoot, and shoot - their way out. The screenplay is totally over-the-top; it's just an excuse for Salim to hurl racial epithets and talk dirty. The movie to stumbles nervously through the Los Angeles underworld, guns popping to a hip-hop soundtrack, as competing black and Mexican hierarchies in the drug trade go at each other.

The movie is bathed in de-saturated colors, jittery camera swings, nervous flashbacks, and fancy image pushing. This all very clever for the first ten minutes, but rapidly becomes irritating. The biggest problem with Dirty, however, is the misrepresentation of cops. It's just too hard to believe that a character as devilishly nasty of Salim would ever be given a chance to participate in such an operation.

Plus the poor Cuba Gooding is rather preposterous here; though he sports a moustache, tattoos and floridly drops several F- and N-words in virtually every line of dialogue, he just never rises about the surprising mediocrity of the material. It's another nail of the coffin of his tragically rapidly declining career. Mike Leonard April 06.

This film is awful. It has no pace, it seems to be plotless - Gooding plays a deeply unpleasant, racist, corrupt cop with no redeeming features, his partner, who I assume we are meant to like is not attractive and invokes no empathy either.

Liberally sprinkled with the "N" word, the film is just unlikeable - the scene featuring an assault on a woman at the beach for example seems unlikely in this age of camera phones.

Police corruption, gang activity and the work of Internal Affairs in the LAPD is dealt with fantastically in The Shield - the wonderful TV series featuring bad cop Vick Mackey and his team. Despite his corruption, it is hard not to like Mackey. Here, it is hard not to completely hate the fact that you have wasted precious minutes of your life watching this terrible film.

We were going to sell it on Amazon, but instead are going to take great joy in ritually destroying the DVD so that non-one else can blame us for inflicting this awful film on them.

Dreadful Dreadful Dreadful!!