Copyright © 2003 by Tony Medley

 Dark Blue, an undisguised attack on the LAPD, is unregurgitated trash.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the career of Writer-Director Ron Shelton who is responsible for some of the most simplistic, worst movies ever to come out of Hollywood, like White Men Can’t Jump, which was sexist, racist, and had no relationship to pickup basketball, which was what it was supposed to be about.  But nobody exposed it for what it was.  It provided the impetus for the juvenile fad of wearing baseball caps backwards.  The reason they did it in the movie was because they played basketball in their baseball caps and they couldn’t shoot with the bill on the front, so they turned it around to the back.  I played pickup basketball for years and never saw anyone play in a baseball cap.  But we weren’t in Hollywood movies.  And nobody has ever explained why the jerks who do it now do it when the whole point of a cap having a bill is to keep the sun out of your eyes.  White Men Can’t Jump had no relationship to the pickup basketball I played for years, and I played at Pauley Pavilion and the UCLA Men’s Gym, as well as other venues around town, with and against top-flight players.

 Shelton followed that up with a golf film, Tin Cup, in which Kevin Costner, a minor golf pro, was made to look like a hero because he took a stupid shot when he had a chance to win one of the Majors.  That wasn’t heroic; it was just stupid and it just showed why Costner had been a loser all his life.  But you couldn’t prove that by the way Shelton ended the movie. That film contained an absurdly impossible shot (as did White Men Can’t Jump); a shot that couldn’t have been made in a million years, but Costner made it, as did Woody Harrelson in White Men Can’t Jump. In Blaze, he directed Paul Newman to the worst performance of his career.  This guy Shelton keeps writing and directing sophomoric movies that appeal to the lowest possible intellect.  I think he’s trying to become the Renaissance Man of Ignorance.

 Dark Blue fits perfectly into Shelton’s long list of uninformed movies.  Like Narc, earlier this year, Dark Blue pictures all cops as profane, corrupt monsters.  Apparently, according to these politically biased moviemakers, one can’t be a cop unless one promises to use the “f” word in every sentence he utters.  In fact, being a policeman is a harrowing profession.  Just as one example, when they pull someone over on a traffic stop they never know if they’re going to be blown away by some fruitcake.  The cops I know are dedicated professionals. If they ever acted like these Hollywood nuts do in Dark Blue and Narc they wouldn’t last ten minutes.

 Dark Blue paints the LAPD as corrupt from top to bottom and all the way in between.  It is replete with gratuitous, disgusting violence and profuse profanity.  There is not any justification for this kind of garbage to be made into a movie.

 February 23, 2003

 The End

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