The greatest movie ever made..!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

recommended

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Homicide detectives Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) and Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy) were taken off the case of Robert Randolph in favor of the FBI. The FBI fumbles the arrest. With mounting racial resentment, the mayor orders the cops to take him alive. Gold stumbles onto a murder of an old Jewish grandmother who ran a store in a black neighborhood. The rumor is that she kept a fortune in the basement. The Jewish family uses their political influence to get Gold as the investigator. Gold is frustrated at losing the Randolph case. He's also not a proud Jew and dismisses this case which would test his Jewish ethnicity.It's David Mamet writing and directing. The dialogue has his mannered style. It's hard-boiled. The visual style is stark. Some of it is off-putting. He's hitting the Jew card very hard right from the start. It's unnecessary. The central concept is intriguing. However, little things keep annoying me. Gold's gun gets taken and fired by a prisoner but there is no investigation afterwards. It shouldn't be up to Gold. There is supposedly a gunman across the way but they don't close the curtains. There are little problems all the way to the end. The most problematic is that Gold's switch feels too abrupt. In fact, I figured he's lying to them to pump for information. In general, the movie doesn't feel natural. There is an intriguing idea but I can't completely buy it.

A 1991 film, "Homicide" opened the careers of two very important stars: William H. Macy, and Ving Rhames. A very under-rated and seldom-seen Joe Mantegna stars as Detective Bobby Gold, who works for an unstated northeastern police department that looks every bit like Baltimore PD. The department is after the killer of two cops. The FBI attempts to arrest the suspected killer (in a wonderfully understated, quiet but efficient initial scene) but manages to let him vanish. The heat is on the mayor's office and politics rage. Det. Gold is called a "kike" by one of the mayor's black handlers. In the process of tracking down the cops' killer, Gold manages to get himself involved in the homicide of an older Jewish woman killed in her store. Was she the target of everyday thugs, or the mark of someone continuing the Jewish pogrom? Mamet shows the policemans mindset in many ways, first by showing racial slurs hurled at him by a angry black city worker at the start of the film, but then later on in the film he meets a hasidic jew who when he tell he can't read Hebrew says "then what good are you". after the policeman is heard making anti-semitic remarks himself by a family member of the case he is working on he goes all out to find the killer, when in actuality they don't care about the homicide at all, but a list that was in the care of the deceased, a list that could expose some of their illegal doings in Israel.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Give me Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy as partners and I'll guarantee that there will be a movie worth watching. Macy has been moving up the chain, and is brilliant here.The whole issue of Jewish persecution is woven in the story, and Mantegna is conflicted because he is Jewish, but obviously not a practicing one. As things go, his Jewishness is challenged by the investigation. "You say you are a Jew, and you can't read Hebrew. What are you then?" He is finally confronted with the reality of hate and his role as a cop takes second place to his Jewishness.It is about realizing that he is nowhere until he finds out who he really is. The language of the police is raw and brings everything out into the open. Detective Gold (Mantegna) doesn't find himself at the end of the film. He has a ways to go, but now he has a direction.

Strong performances by Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, and others, somewhat offsets the hard to swallow script. Intelligent dialog permeates the film, and it does not lack action. What appears to be missing is an appropriate ending that ties up the many dangling plot threads. "Homicide" has a strong undercurrent of unanswered questions that will gnaw at the viewer following the rushed conclusion. Torn between two investigations, Mantegna's character is pivotal, and in the end his decisions seem neither logical or likely. Nevertheless, "Homicide" is far better than most police drama's and worth seeking out for the fine performances. - MERK