Rampart

Directed by Oren Moverman. Starring Woody Harrelson, Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Ice Cube, Ned Beatty, Steve Buscemi, Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche 16 cert, gen release, 108 min

A FEW YEARS ago, Oren Moverman directed The Messenger, a film that revelled in its own restraint. Rampart, his follow-up, offers a few echoes of that earlier release. Once again, Woody Harrelson plays against type as a man in a uniform. It takes place in bright, strength-sucking sunlight. It's another story of men doing what men must do.

Rampartis, however, a very different piece of work to its disciplined predecessor. Everyone involved is showing off like love- hungry kids meeting a potential step-parent for the first time. The acting is off the leash. James Ellroy's script is stuffed with grandstanding flourishes. And the direction? If the camera isn't drifting drunkenly about the room, it's delivering still images of moist body parts to the accompaniment of clanking machine noise. Somebody please fan my armpits.

Dave Brown (Harrelson) plays a chain-smoking Los Angeles cop, whose tendency to kick suspects in the head doesn’t quite overwhelm his medieval moral certainty. Brown has found himself sucked into the so-called Rampart scandal that brewed around the LAPD in 1999. It looks as if the authorities may be pursuing Dave, recently suspended for laying into a suspect, as a way of deflecting accusations of more widespread corruption.

Then again, something entirely different may be brewing. Ellroy and Moverman have delivered a rather brilliant character study, but they have expended little effort on developing the story.

The film is packed with memorable situations and faintly crazy directorial switchbacks. At one stage, during a stop-off in a sex club, the director decides to exercise his inner Gaspar Noë and allows the film to break down into total abstraction. The contrast between Dave’s cowboy politics and his alternative lifestyle (he has had daughters by two, ostentatiously liberal sisters) invites us to think him unimaginably complex.

It’s all very impressive in a showy way. But you leave the cinema full of the wrong sorts of questions. What the hell is Robin Wright’s up to? How deep in the ordure is Dave? Hang on, is the film actually over or has the projector broken down mid-scene?

Still, Rampartis definitely worth seeing for its oddness alone.