Police Gazette

By J.C.

BUSTING Directed and Written by PETER HYAMS

There is a great deal militating against the success of this enterprise, mostly of its own devising. First of all, as the title implies, this is a police movie, a genre so overworked during the past few months that it nearly has the status of an ecological menace. Busting features the usual climactic car chase, which is sufficiently grueling but also grindingly familiar, and a camera that seems forever to be bouncing across the scenes it is recording, as if the crew were performing a perpetual schottische. It is enough to reduce anyone to mumbling such truisms as "Mobility is no substitute for style" and other hardy perennials of the critical trade.

Yet as brutal and mangy as it is, the movie still works. It is an adept and forceful B picture, deriving much of its energy from its own streamlined sleaziness and from the skills of its two stars, Elliott Gould and Robert Blake. Both of them have a kind of sour, dehydrated charm that is nicely used by Director-Writer Hyams, whose most notable previous effort was the screenplay for the noxious T.R. Baskin. Gould and Blake play a couple of L.A. vice cops who are offhandedly conscientious about their work and cynical about its results. Their superiors, ever mindful of valuable connections and their bank accounts, are constantly thwarting them in their appointed rounds. Gould and Blake are good, dogged street cops, and they know where the action is. They just can't get to it. So out of frustration and a certain embarrassment, they have to bust whoever is without influence, people they would probably just as soon leave alone--whores or some gays trying to have a good time in a bar. It is only when they swear vengeance on a porcine vice lord and pusher (Allen Garfield) that things really begin to come down on them.

Much Life. Gould is especially adept at a stumblebum wise-guy act, which stands him in good stead through most of the movie. It is a pose, however, that he finds difficult to shake. When he is called upon to look injured and badly beaten, he does not quite pull it off.

Gould will not even take the serious parts of the film seriously, so it is fitting that Hyams has not chosen to include many. Busting does make a fairly important point: it is as much life inside the station house as out on the street that grinds cops down, makes them petty and vicious. Hyams shows this deadening process with a raucous, vulgar vitality. Busting is a pointedly lowdown movie about lowlife.

J.C.

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