PRINCE OF THE CITY is a film about a narcotics officer who co-operates with Internal Affairs to build a case against criminals and policemen involved in police corruption.
This movie is painful to watch, because its protagonist is so pitifully stupid. From the start, he knows exactly what could go wrong if he becomes a rat for IA, but he still goes ahead and does it. The real problem is that when everything DOES go wrong, he is just astonished. Unfortunately, that astonishment translates into Treat Williams bellowing and shrieking for almost three hours, while the audience just shakes our heads in indifference. His Danny Ciello is everything which is wrong with cop movies or cop TV shows; the self-pity and self-obsession, the constant rationalization, the hiding behind cop myths and partner myths, and the corruption. The movie is such that to have a point, the viewer would have to empathize on some level with it's protagonist, but this protagonist, and the actor who portrays him, make that impossible.
His issues are non-issues. He wasn't taken in, he wasn't deceived, he knew exactly what was going to go wrong, and then it did. His only real issue is that he's upset about it. We aren't upset for him, because he walked right into it. When he lies, he's not convincing. When other characters believe his lies, they just make us angry at their stupidity. When he lies again and again about giving drugs to his informants, he wears out our patience completely, and when he reacts in fury that no one believes him, we get up to do the dishes.
Toward the end of the movie, James Tolkan's prosecutor character confronts Ciello and says, "That's how you got here, don't you understand?" Williams' facial expression here is unintentionally hilarious, because it is obvious that he does not, in fact, understand, anymore than he has understood anything else that's happened in the film.
Lindsey Crouse as Danny's wife has all the personality and warmth of a statue in a dump in the dead of winter. None of her interactions, or her purpose as a character, make any sense. Neither do Williams' interactions make any sense. In the beginning, he smacks his brother around. His brother is screaming his head off, and Danny is beating the hell out of him, but we don't know what they're talking about, and it is not clear what this is supposed to show us about either of them, so there's no point to any of it. This scene, like most of the film, just comes off as an acting class exercise of some sort. If he's not screaming at someone or trying to choke them to death, he's hugging them like they are his dearest friends. None of these are ever appropriate to the scene or to the characters.
The movie is easily an hour too long. A 2-hour film, or a 90-minute film, would have been fine, because there is not enough story for more than that. You could chop out the middle hour, have a placard that said "3 years later", show the concluding scenes, and it would be over. Having no story allows Sidney Lumet to practice cinematographic techniques without distractions. A film school student might enjoy watching his touches here and there, but an acting student, or a viewer hoping to be entertained, should avoid it like the plague.
This movie is painful to watch, because its protagonist is so pitifully stupid. From the start, he knows exactly what could go wrong if he becomes a rat for IA, but he still goes ahead and does it. The real problem is that when everything DOES go wrong, he is just astonished. Unfortunately, that astonishment translates into Treat Williams bellowing and shrieking for almost three hours, while the audience just shakes our heads in indifference. His Danny Ciello is everything which is wrong with cop movies or cop TV shows; the self-pity and self-obsession, the constant rationalization, the hiding behind cop myths and partner myths, and the corruption. The movie is such that to have a point, the viewer would have to empathize on some level with it's protagonist, but this protagonist, and the actor who portrays him, make that impossible.
His issues are non-issues. He wasn't taken in, he wasn't deceived, he knew exactly what was going to go wrong, and then it did. His only real issue is that he's upset about it. We aren't upset for him, because he walked right into it. When he lies, he's not convincing. When other characters believe his lies, they just make us angry at their stupidity. When he lies again and again about giving drugs to his informants, he wears out our patience completely, and when he reacts in fury that no one believes him, we get up to do the dishes.
Toward the end of the movie, James Tolkan's prosecutor character confronts Ciello and says, "That's how you got here, don't you understand?" Williams' facial expression here is unintentionally hilarious, because it is obvious that he does not, in fact, understand, anymore than he has understood anything else that's happened in the film.
Lindsey Crouse as Danny's wife has all the personality and warmth of a statue in a dump in the dead of winter. None of her interactions, or her purpose as a character, make any sense. Neither do Williams' interactions make any sense. In the beginning, he smacks his brother around. His brother is screaming his head off, and Danny is beating the hell out of him, but we don't know what they're talking about, and it is not clear what this is supposed to show us about either of them, so there's no point to any of it. This scene, like most of the film, just comes off as an acting class exercise of some sort. If he's not screaming at someone or trying to choke them to death, he's hugging them like they are his dearest friends. None of these are ever appropriate to the scene or to the characters.
The movie is easily an hour too long. A 2-hour film, or a 90-minute film, would have been fine, because there is not enough story for more than that. You could chop out the middle hour, have a placard that said "3 years later", show the concluding scenes, and it would be over. Having no story allows Sidney Lumet to practice cinematographic techniques without distractions. A film school student might enjoy watching his touches here and there, but an acting student, or a viewer hoping to be entertained, should avoid it like the plague.