With ”The Rookie,” Clint Eastwood is clearly fulfilling his unwritten agreement with Warner Brothers: Here is an unabashedly commercial movie intended to compensate for Eastwood`s recent series of artistically ambitious projects, including this fall`s superlative ”White Hunter, Black Heart.”
”Commercial,” of course, does not need to mean ”bad,” and ”The Rookie” is a generally enjoyable variation on some extremely familiar themes, filled out with the most spectacular action sequences Eastwood has ever filmed and a good dose of the dyspeptic humor that is becoming the hallmark of his late career as an actor.
To borrow the jazz metaphor that Eastwood has often explored, ”The Rookie” is like a solo that has long become set in the player`s mind and the public`s affection, and is produced on demand with a mixture of pride and mild boredom. With only so much room for spontaneity-otherwise, the piece would become unrecognizable-Eastwood is unable to introduce too many new ideas or run too far with the old ones.
Nevertheless, his virtuosity, both as a filmmaker and a film presence, is amply on display, and there are a number of intriguing suggestions-ideas that Eastwood might be able to bring to fruition in a later, more personal project. ”The Rookie” is at its most engaging in its opening reels, a strange nocturnal fantasy that knits together a Kafkaesque nightmare, a painful flashback to a childhood trauma, faces drifting in and out of the darkness and a wildly surrealistic chase sequence, in which Eastwood`s character, a gruff Los Angeles police detective named Nick Pulovski, pursues a rocketing auto-transport truck across an eerily deserted city and onto a crowded
expressway. The mayhem that follows (the heavies release the truck`s cargo-a collection of stolen sports cars that careen driverless all over the road) has the absolute clarity and the absolute absurdity of a dream.
These sequences, linked only by rhythm, color and movement, follow a film logic that is irresistible; it`s only when ”The Rookie” wanders into literary logic, via the cliche-ridden screenplay by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel, that it begins to pale.
When Pulovski loses his partner in a shootout, he`s given fresh young David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen) as a replacement; together the old maverick and the young, by-the-book rookie set out to bring the killers to justice.
There are no surprises as the ethnic, blue-collar Pulovski (he used to be a race car driver, but always finished second) slowly warms to his new charge Ackerman, who turns out to be the neglected, guilt-ridden son of a fabulously wealthy businessman (Tom Skerritt).
Pulovski becomes a surrogate father, dispensing practical advice
(”Always aim for the heart”) between pulls on a silver hip flask and drags on a droopy cigar.
The plot is plainly meant as a passing of the torch, and Sheen holds up his end by turning in his most controlled and least self-regarding performance since ”Platoon.” For Eastwood, whose interests have lately shifted from the active duty of performance to the desk job of direction, Sheen represents a new generation of actors, who need to be stripped of their method affectations and broken into the more casual business of movie stardom, just as Sheen`s character needs to abandon the book and loosen his tie.
The growing and genuine warmth of the Eastwood-Sheen relationship is played against the wholly stylized wackiness of the villains, who turn out to be a couple of hot-blooded Latins (Raul Julia and Sonia Braga) pretending, for reasons never remotely explained, to be coldly calculating Germans, complete in Julia`s case with a fizzy Prussian accent.
For Eastwood, these characters represent an uncharacteristic injection of camp-the effect is like casting Desi Arnaz as Dr. Mabuse-and it`s hard to know what to make of it. In the film`s most weirdly charged sequence, a kidnaped Eastwood sits handcuffed to a chair while Braga (the sex bomb of ”Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands”) violates him with a razor blade, something that never seemed to happen to John Wayne.
”The Rookie” maintains its odd and appealing mingling of tones until very near its end, when Eastwood makes a serious mistake by offering a summary execution in place of a climax. Meant to be an audience-pleasing moment of low catharsis, it is instead strikingly ugly and morally skewed-the one gesture of blunt commercialism that mars this otherwise happily commercial picture.
”THE ROOKIE”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel;
photographed by Jack Green; music by Lennie Niehaus; produced by Howard Kazanjian, Steven Siebert and David Valdes. A Warner Brothers release; opens Dec. 7 at the Broadway, Chestnut Station and outlying theaters. Running time: 2:01. MPAA rating: R. Violence, strong language, adult situations.
THE CAST
Nick Pulovski…………………………………….Clint Eastwood
David Ackerman…………………………………….Charlie Sheen
Strom……………………………………………….Raul Julia
Leisel……………………………………………..Sonia Braga
Sara…………………………………………..Lara Flynn Boyle
