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Joe Carnahan's bloody morality tale
Narc (2002)
Filmmaker Joe Carnahan taps the essence and intrigue of the early-70s cop thriller with his sophomore feature film, the breathless, sometimes harrowing, Narc, an artfully rendered bloody detective story he calls "a tale of relative morality." What's more, he tightens the crime genre's focus, resolving his protagonists into realistic, distinct characters serving their own agendas and neuroses.
Carnahan wrote and directed the film which stars Jason Patric and Ray Liotta as a pair of street-hardened detectives. Patric plays Nick Tellis, an undercover cop returning from disgrace following an ill-fated shootout with a deranged junkie that cost a pregnant woman her unborn child's life. He is assigned to work with Liotta's character, the hulking Henry Oak, to crack the case of a murdered cop, who happens to be Oak's old partner. Where Oak is brutal in his methods, Tellis is more of a sleuth, yet the actors find an uneasy chemistry between their mismatched characters, culminating in a flurry of hypotheses, suspicion and bloody violence. Throughout, Tellis comes to terms with his own fears and loyalties while Oak wades hip-deep through the carnage, girded with his own moral resolve and dealing out his own bloody justice.
Carnahan cites Errol Morris's 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line as a major impetus for his story. William Friedkin's The French Connection and Sidney Lumet's Serpico also loom in the background. Nearly three quarters of Narc was shot handheld by cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy. Combined with lighting techniques, this allowed Carnahan to capture an overall, worn grayness with the roughness of the vintage films Narc channels. Camera angles, serial editing and the fragmented, elliptical manner in which Narc unfolds were led by Carnahan's desire to tell the story via Patric's character.
The realism of Narc, from its setting in the decaying, post-industrial wasteland of Detroit, to moments such as a split-screen montage of Tellis working his junkie contacts for leads, set it apart from the idealized heroics of contemporary cop movies. Most striking of all Narc's verite appeal, though, are the weaknesses and flaws portrayed so well by Patric and Liotta.
Narc is a crack-crazed killer of a film.
See also: Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane
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