 To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) It's the 80s equivalent of the earlier film, though that cuts both ways. Where The French Connection was clunky and clanky, Live and Die is smooth and propulsive. Where TFC was raw and gritty, TLADILA is attractive and stylish. Where TFC was draggy, LA moves. But where TFC had Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider, LA has William L. Petersen and John Pankow. That's a pretty severe step down. Surprisingly, Wang Chung's underappreciated soundtrack music is truly the MVP of LA. I like The French Connection, though I've never seen why it's so revered. The performances are outstanding, but there's a huge number of real dead spots. Yet I've always loved To Live and Die in L.A., despite some serious flaws. The characters are pure cliché, the script is frequently quite lame, the dialogue is sometimes laughable (samples: "If you want bread, fuck a baker," and "If you want a pigeon, go to the park"), and the acting is nothing to write home about. But the flaws of LA are much more acceptable to me than those of Connection, simply because this one just rollicks. One tight scene leads to another, stitched together mostly by the perfectly seedy score, full of thumping synth bass and shikka-shikka drum patterns. The music complements the photography to a tee, creating what is surely the progenitor of every movie TNT has ever made. Stylized visuals, shikka-shikka drum patterns, and rogue cops chasing soulless criminals … it all started here, for better and worse. Petersen plays a Secret Service agent named Chance ('cause he takes risks!) going after counterfeiter Willem Dafoe (names Masters, 'cause he's the master of his fate!). After Chance's partner is killed by Masters, he vows to take the counterfeiter down by any means necessary, enlisting John Pankow (the big-forehead guy from "Mad About You") as his reluctant sidekick. Defoe, as usual, rides the line between genius and laughability, mostly staying in the former camp. Petersen is fine, though he's just not cut out to be a leading man … there's something vaguely off about him, though it's exactly that untrustworthiness that makes him right for the character. Pankow is reasonably tough and conflicted. John Turturro is great as one of Defoe's money-laundering buddies. Dean Stockwell is completely restrained as an amoral lawyer … nary an "Oh Boy!" uttered or cigar chomped. All the women in the movie are sex objects and/or birds in gilded cages … not much depth to any of those roles, though they're nice to look at. A young Jane Leeves is seen briefly as a sexy dancer.
There's a justly celebrated car chase that is about as close to chaos as a car chase comes, and a genuinely shocking climax that spins things around entirely. The ending is bleak, but perhaps not bleak enough. There's an alternate ending on the DVD that shows how the studio wanted it to end, which is completely preposterous. Made me appreciate the relative letdown that the actual ending is. TLADILA is not the unacknowledged masterpiece I would love it to be, but it's got much to recommend it, especially if you like 80s music, 80s movies, TNT movies, the 80s in general, rogue cops, Jane Leeves, John Pankow, William Friedkin, Willem Dafoe, John Turturro, Wang Chung, or 80s movie music. Hm, was that last line a sentence, or a meta-tag? Ah, what's the difference, my writing is read almost exclusively by search engine robots anyway.
Review by La Fée |
