Both the poster and the trailer for the crime drama Rampart, out today, loudly herald its LAPD antihero as “the most corrupt copyou’ve ever seen on screen.” The marketing gimmick is effective, just like the heavy metal guitars the trailer employs to make even taking a dip in the swimming pool seem thrillingly sinister. But the marketers could also use some perspective.
The corruptness of Hollywood’s most corrupt cops cannot be underestimated. Woody Harrelson’s Officer Dave Brown is indeed a pretty bad and deeply troubled dude. He’sracist, ill-tempered, and a womanizer. But his corruption is a case of mild dyspepsia compared to the rabid rampages that are S.O.P. for many other movie cops.
Advertisement
Hollywood likes its cops over the top. Several actors have given their most scenery-chewing performances as police officers (usually as members of the LAPD, the local force for most moviemakers, and a department familiar with real-life scandal itself). They plant evidence, take out other cops that get in the way, and shoot at dead gangsters because “their souls are still dancing.”
Here are 10 cops more corrupt than Harrelson’s Dave Brown, along with an internal affairs-style report on the estimable misdeeds of each. Eat your heart out, Officer Brown.
Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles)
Film noir is filled with dirty cops, but few if any are as fallen as Orson Welles’ racist police captain in Touch of Evil (1958). Quinlan is one of the last villains of film noir’s classic era, and actor and director Welles takes him to even more sensational places than the villains who preceded him. Quinlan plants evidence just about everywhere he goes, kidnaps Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh), injects her with drugs, frames her for murder, and, by the end, kills his own partner.
Whether you agree with this choice may depend almost entirely on your politics. While “Dirty” Harry Callahan is the most famous character on this list, and almost certainly the one who became most archetypal (see: Bauer, Jack), his status as hero or antihero is still up for debate.
Harry may be a hero in the sense that he always gets (and usually kills) the bad guys, and he lives in a world where red tape somehow really does always get in the way of justice—but he also breaks the law repeatedly, kills a lot of people (more than any other character on this list, by far, I’m pretty sure: 45, by Wikipedia’s count), and his name is “Dirty” for a reason. When Rampart’s Officer Dave Brown says, “I’m not a racist. I hate all people equally,” he conjures up nearly the same line from Dirty Harry (1971)—movie cops still live in Dirty Harry’s shadow.
While it’s not exactly the classic that the previous two films are, Internal Affairs (1990) takes the corrupt cop trope to sleazier, creepier places. As you might guess, the title doesn’t just refer to the police department—and it’s not just the uniforms that are a little blue.
Richard Gere’s Officer Dennis Peck is the man responsible for all that. Over the course of the film, the devious Peck shoots an unarmed man, plants evidence, sleeps with his partner’s wife, strangles another cop, blows away some other associates, attempts to rape the hero’s wife, and sleeps with the wife of one of his partners in crime (earlier, he’d also killed the criminal’s parents).
As the first film on this list that leaves no hero (however fascistic) to root for, Bad Lieutenant (1992) is one of Rampart’s closest ancestors. Keitel’s titular antihero begins the film (and his day) by snorting some cocaine, chases it with crack, then brokers a drug deal while on duty. In a later druggy haze (he does a lot of his driving under the influence) he pulls over some minors and forces them to strip and perform sex acts. Eventually he deliberately lets others get away with robbery and raping a nun.
Ray Liotta, who has also played crooked cops in Narc (2002) and Cop Land (1997), gets his longest rap sheet from Unlawful Entry (1992). Again, the title isn’t meant to imply that it’s just houses that are broken into—the early 1990s saw some steamy twists on the corrupt cop drama, perhaps due in part to the monster popularity of erotic thriller Fatal Attraction—so I won’t dwell too long on the stalkerish Liotta’s worst offenses. Briefly, those include: police brutality, cop killing, framing for murder, planting drugs, burglary, peeping, and attempted rape.
Agent Normal Stansfield isn’t the hero of 1994's The Professional (he’s the villain, while the titular hit man is the hero); and he’s hardly even a main character. But he’s definitely worth including for being quite possibly the most over-the-top creation in this slide show—an impressive feat for a list that includes a performance by Nicolas Cage.
Stansfield is a higher-up in the DEA, but he’s addicted to a mysterious narcotic pill that he likes to pop before blasting Beethoven and opening fire on innocent people. His most devilish scene involves breaking into the home of young Natalie Portman’s Mathilda and killing her entire family before burning the house down. The deeds are horrifying, but Oldman is so hammy that the scene is almost comic.
Based on a novel by James Ellroy (who also wrote Rampart),L.A. Confidential (1997) takes place in a world in which every last officer on the LAPD is corrupt—and Captain Dudley Smith is the reason why. Smith isn’t so much the corrupted as the corrupter, insisting on rule-bending, coercion, and evidence-tampering from his whole department, all while conspiring closely with organized crime. And he doesn’t just work by influence and delegation: When at least one cop steps out of line, he kills him.
As I said, the role of the crooked cop tends to make for wonderfully demented screen performances. Sometimes, it can even win you an Oscar. That’s what the role of Detective Alonzo Harris did for Denzel Washington in Training Day (2001).
All the action of the movietakes place over the course of one day; during that time, Alonzo blackmails his partner, forces him to smoke PCP without his knowledge, steals drug money, encourages gang retaliation, and ultimately offers a bounty of thousands of dollars for the murder of his partner (this is when he makes a certain comparison between himself and King Kong).
The Departed's Colin Sullivan is indeed a cop, but as a double agent it’s worth noting that he’s just one step away from officer impersonators like Face/Off’s Castor Troy, Terminator 2: Judgement Day’s T-1000, and Transformers’ Barricade. His evil is more subdued, but as an informant to the mob he precipitates nearly every death in the film, personally offing a few victims—including Jack Nicholson’s mob boss and a state trooper—himself. Sullivan represents consummate corruption: a full-time employee of the crime world who's only masquerading as a cop.
Bad Lieutenant set the bar for corrupt cop movies, and Werner Herzog’s unofficial remake Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009) brought the genre to the brink of self-parody.Few actors are willing to go as gonzo as Nicolas Cage, and the ravenous id of this character frees him to lose his shit more frequently, and with more deadly force, than perhaps any other role in his career.
Torturing helpless old ladies is just one of the many offenses Cage’s Lieutenant McDonagh commits. McDonagh is a gambling addict and a vicodin addict, and also an enthusiast for cannabis and cocaine, which he snorts in mounds with the prostitute who is his girlfriend. Like the original, this Bad Lieutenant also smokes crack from his “lucky crack pipe” (“You don’t have a lucky crack pipe?”), and deals drugs with a gang leader named Big Fate. I already mentioned his executing break-dancing souls with extreme prejudice; other suspicious activities include hallucinating iguanas.
If there’s a corrupt-cop arms race, and a way to top this, I’m not sure I want to see it.