Cop Land

Cop Land
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	James Mangold
Written by	James Mangold
Produced by	Cathy Konrad Ezra Swerdlow Cary Woods
Starring	Sylvester Stallone Harvey Keitel Ray Liotta Robert De Niro Peter Berg Janeane Garofalo Robert Patrick Michael Rapaport Annabella Sciorra
Cinematography	Eric Alan Edwards
Edited by	Craig McKay
Music by	Howard Shore
Production company	Woods Entertainment[1]
Distributed by	Miramax Films[1]
Release date	August 15, 1997 (1997-08-15) (US)
Running time	105 minutes[2]
Country	United States[1]
Language	English
Budget	$15 million[2][3]
Box office	$63.7 million[3]

Cop Land is a 1997 American neo-noir^[4] crime drama film written and directed by James Mangold. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro, with Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick, Michael Rapaport, and Annabella Sciorra in supporting roles. Stallone portrays the sheriff of a small New Jersey town who comes into conflict with the corrupt New York City police officers living in the community. The film received positive reviews and grossed $63.7 million on a $15 million budget.

Plot[]

The town of Garrison, New Jersey, is home to several NYPD officers, led by Lt. Ray Donlan along with Jack Rucker, Gary Figgis, and Joey Randone, who is having an affair with Donlan's wife Rose. Freddy Heflin, the town sheriff, idolizes the NYPD and once hoped to become an officer, but ultimately cannot because he is deaf in one ear, the result of rescuing a drowning woman many years earlier. Heflin is aware that Garrison's and his associates are involved in police corruption, but generally turns a blind eye as they do not recognize his authority. Internal Affairs investigator Lt. Moe Tilden approaches Heflin for information on the corrupt officers, but Heflin is intimidated and reluctant to betray them.

One night, Donlan's nephew, Officer Murray Babitch, is side-swiped by two African-American teens while driving across the George Washington Bridge. The passenger points what looks like a weapon just before Babitch's tire blows out, and Babitch shoots back and kills the teens, believing they have fired at him. Afterwards, Rucker removes the steering-wheel lock that Babitch mistook for a weapon from the scene and is caught trying to plant a gun in the car. Worried about the repercussions to his own career, Donlan persuades Babitch to fake his own suicide.

When Heflin visits Tilden to share information, he is angrily dismissed by Tilden who explains that the investigation has been shut down. On his way out, Heflin steals case files on the Garrison cops and realizes the extent of the officers' corruption. As Babitch lives as a fugitive at Donlan's home, Vincent Lassaro, president of the Patrolmen's Defense Association, tells Donlan that without a body, the case will not stay cold. Donlan reluctantly decides to murder Babitch.

Randone's wife Liz visits Heflin at home, who was the woman Heflin saved from drowning years ago. While Liz and Heflin confess their feelings for each other, she reluctantly leaves before things go too far. Meanwhile, Babitch escapes and goes to Heflin's house for help after being tipped off by Rose, but flees when he sees Figgis. That same evening, Randone ends up in trouble; Donlan is the first to arrive at the scene, but deliberately delays intervention in revenge for Randone's affair with Rose, leading to the former's death.

Heflin finds Figgis packing to leave, discovering that Figgis had burned down his own house for the insurance money, and inadvertently killed his drug-addicted girlfriend in the process. Heflin convinces Rose to reveal Babitch's hide-out and takes him into custody. Donlan's team ambush them and fire a pistol next to Heflin's good ear, deafening him, and kidnap Babitch.

On foot, Heflin follows them to Donlan's house, where a shootout begins and he is joined by Figgis. Donlan, Rucker, and the other officers are killed, while Heflin and Figgis take Babitch to New York City and hand him over to Tilden. After the scandal has been investigated, Heflin, with the hearing in his good ear restored, surveys the New York skyline from across the Hudson River and returns to work.

Cast[]

Production[]

Development[]

Garrison is based on Mangold's hometown of Washingtonville, New York, located about 60 miles (97 km) from New York City. Mangold grew up in a development called Worley Heights, where many of the residents were current and former NYPD police officers.^[5] Stallone gained 40 pounds (18 kg) to portray the beaten-down sheriff of Garrison.^[6]

Filming[]

The principal shooting location for the film was Edgewater, New Jersey.^[7]

Music[]

The film's soundtrack features two songs from Bruce Springsteen's 1980 album The River: "Drive All Night" and "Stolen Car", songs by other artists, and an original score from Howard Shore. One additional song, Blue Öyster Cult's "Burnin' for You", was added to the soundtrack of the director's cut, first released on home video in 2004.

The score by Howard Shore was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and released as Cop Land: Music from the Miramax Motion Picture in 1997. The soundtrack released on CD contained twelve tracks, with a runtime of 40:11 minutes.^[8][9]

Release[]

Theatrical[]

Cop Land premiered at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on August 6, 1997. Some of the film's cast members attended, including Stallone, Keitel, Liotta, Sciorra, Moriarty and Rapaport.^[10]

Stallone's understated performance was praised by critics and he received the Best Actor award at the Stockholm International Film Festival. Cop Land was also screened at the 54th Venice Film Festival in the Midnight line-up.^[11] Earlier in May 1997, the film was accepted into the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but Miramax declined the invitation due to re-shoots that were needed for the film, including footage of Stallone 40 pounds heavier.^[6]

Home media[]

Cop Land has been released on VHS and DVD numerous times since 1998. The initial extras-free DVDs had the theatrical cut in non-anamorphic widescreen, while subsequent issues, including various "Collector's Editions" on DVD and Blu-ray, have favoured the director's cut. StudioCanal's French and German region B-locked Blu-rays exclusively feature both the 101-minute theatrical cut and 116-minute director's cut.

Extras include an audio commentary (with James Mangold, Sylvester Stallone, Robert Patrick, and producer Cathy Konrad), "The Making of an Urban Western" featurette, a storyboard comparison, two deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer.

The two deleted scenes primarily show the racism in the town of Garrison. One scene involves all the resident police officers chasing down a pair of black motorists, and the other shows Heflin's deputy pointing out that the majority of the tickets issued in Garrison go to black motorists on charges that suggest racial profiling.

Reception[]

Critical response[]

Based on 63 reviews collected by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 75%. The site's consensus states: "Cop Land gifts its star-studded cast with richly imagined characters while throttling the audience with carefully-ratcheted suspense, although this potboiler lacks the moral complexity of the crime classics that it harkens to."^[12] On Metacritic it has a score of 64 out of 100 based on reviews from 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[13] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.^[14]

Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "There is a rough balance between how long a movie is, how deep it goes and how much it can achieve. That balance is not found in Cop Land and the result is too much movie for the running time".^[15] On the other hand, Gene Siskel praised the movie, especially the screenplay, as "one to be savored."^{[citation needed]}

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that "the strength of Cop Land is in its hard-edged, novelistic portraits, which pile up furiously during the film's dynamic opening scenes ... Yet if the price of Mangold's casting ambitions is a story that can't, finally, match its marquee value, that value is still inordinately strong. Everywhere the camera turns in this tense and volatile drama, it finds enough interest for a truckload of conventional Hollywood fare. Whatever its limitations, Cop Land has talent to burn".^[16]

Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B−" rating, and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Stallone does a solid, occasionally winning job of going through the motions of shedding his stardom, but the wattage of his personality is turned way down—at times, it's turned down to neutral. And that pretty much describes Cop Land, too. Dense, meandering, ambitious yet jarringly pulpy, this tale of big-city corruption in small-town America has competence without mood or power—a design but not a vision".^[17] In her review for The Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote, "With its redundancy of supporting characters, snarled subplots and poky pace, Cop Land really might have been better off trading the director for a traffic cop".^[18] Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers praised Stallone's performance: "His performance builds slowly but achieves a stunning payoff when Freddy decides to clean up his town ... Freddy awakes to his own potential, and it's exhilarating to watch the character and the actor revive in unison. Nearly down for the count in the movie ring, Stallone isn't just back in the fight. He's a winner".^[19] In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle also liked Stallone's work: "His transformation is more than a matter of weight. He looks spiritually beaten and terribly sad. He looks like a real person, not a cult-of-the-body film star, and he uses the opportunity to deliver his best performance in years".^[20]

With its dark tone and all-star dramatic cast, Cop Land was a shift from Stallone's recent comic efforts which were critical and box office bombs (1991's Oscar and 1992's Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot). Additionally, Cop Land was to show Stallone in a completely different light, both physically (his 40-pound weight gain got a lot of press coverage),^[6] as well as artistically, by letting him showcase his acting skills. The film posted solid box-office takings ($44.9 million domestically^[3]), got good reviews, and Stallone received positive critical notices for his performance. Yet Stallone has said the film was bad for his career. In a 2019 interview Stallone called Mangold "the best director I ever worked with [but the film] actually worked in reverse. It was pretty good critically, but the fact that it didn't do a lot of box office, again it fomented the opinion that I had my moment and was going the way of the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger."^[21]

James Mangold said the hype due to the casting “overscaled the movie“ and added: “I’m very proud of the movie and the ideas in it, but one of the things that was difficult for me at the time was that I’d imagined the lead being someone you hadn’t heard of before, so that their extension into a hero would be less Hollywood.“^[22]

References[]

External links[]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Cop Land

• Cop Land at IMDb
• Cop Land at AllMovie
• Cop Land at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Cop Land at Box Office Mojo