Nothing busts canons quite like living in interesting times. In our ongoing Inflection Point series, we look back at the films that have taken on new relevance due to our ongoing cultural and political upheaval. Some beloved, some undiscovered, these titles deserve newfound consideration as film criticism evolves to meet the moment.
As acts of police violence have played out across social media and the nightly news, audiences have begun to rethink their relationship with cop movies. On Monday, critic Kathryn VanArendonk dug into the ironclad relationship television companies have formed with pro-police narratives. And on Thursday, Washington Post writer Alyssa Rosenberg made an impassioned please to put an end to cop narratives altogether. “There are always gaps between reality and fiction,” the latter wrote, “but given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity.”
In this period of reevaluation for cop films and television shows, it is good to revisit old favorites with new eyes. Every film is a product of its era – a combination of economic and social factors that evolve and change over time – but our relationship to these films is anything but static. Our canons are living, breathing entities, and our ability to think critically about movies allows us to form new relationships with past films. And one such police thriller in need of such reappraisal is “Narc,” the 2002 procedural from writer-director Joe Carnahan.
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After an undercover operation goes south, Nick Tellis (Jason Patric), a disgraced narcotics officer, is pulled out of an unwanted retirement to help solve the murder of a fellow police officer. The only catch? He must work with Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), the dead officer’s former commanding officer, who will stop at nothing to bring the murderers to justice. Together, the two mean must retrace the steps of the dead cop and piece together the sequence of events that lead to his death, all without falling afoul of the political entities pressuring them for a quick conviction.
“Narc,” the first feature following Carnahan’s no-budget 1998 film “Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane,” shows many of the same stylistic touches that would make Carnahan the master of the second-tier action movies. From the frenetic handheld opening chase scene to the picture-in-picture approach that Carnahan takes to the earliest days of the investigation, “Narc” possesses the same lean pacing that fans would find in “The Grey.” Those who prefer their procedurals steeped in ‘70s grime and plainclothes swagger will find a lot to enjoy about the world that Carnahan has created.
But like many cop films, “Narc” also centers the trauma around the officers and their families. In the film’s opening sequence, we witness Tellis as he opens fire on a drug dealer in the middle of a playground. One of the mothers is hit, and the camera zooms in on him – not on the wounded woman – as anguish plays out his face. The film then skips forward several months, where a discharged Tellis heatedly defends his actions before a civilian tribunal. “If you haven’t seen what I’ve seen, or done what I’ve done,” he replies when pressed about the shooting, “you don’t know where I’m coming from.”
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Carnahan’s film offers no shortage of trauma suffered in the line of duty. Tellis is grieving; Oaks is grieving; the widow of Michael Calvess, the unsolved homicide at the center of the film, is also grieving. Great care is taken throughout “Narc” to show how these deaths affect this community of police officers, but life outside of the Detroit Police Department is cheap. “Narc” never circles back to address the woman shot in the playground. Later in the film, the accidental death of a low-level drug dealer – a young Black man who has barely stayed on Tellis’s radar – is played for laughs. Only those wearing or married to the badge are truly given space to grieve.
None of this should come as a surprise, especially in a post-9/11 America where shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire” muddied the waters between what is legal and what is “right.” But what separates “Narc” from other police thrillers of its ilk is the film’s lack of an underlying relative morality. The obsession Tellis has with solving the murder of Calvess is not born of police solidarity or the idea that some wrongs should be righted irrespective of the cost. Instead, Tellis has launched into an existential freefall, determined to find some righteousness in the job that has cost him his family and his health. As his personal life falls apart, and his drug addiction resurfaces in the form of prescription painkillers, Tellis becomes fixated on the need to find a moral center to his madness.
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It is fascinating to watch Tellis and Oak interact with each other. Liotta, in perhaps his finest form, fits neatly within the archetype of ’90s cop movies. Although he frequently departs from department procedure – and administers the occasional beating in the name of expedience – he is defended by others as a good cop because he closes cases. To add to the tension, “Narc” also hints at an impending round of departmental reforms to Oak and his team, ones that threaten to usher him and his old-school methods off into early retirement.
But where Tellis wavers, Oak stands resolute. Oak is not a man with doubts; his career in the force has presented him with a moral compass that guides him over (or through) any number of low-level drug offenders and criminals who stand in his path. As we learn more about the actions he has taken to defend Calvess and his family – the laws he has broken to look out for another cop – we recognize him as any of a thousand police officers on the big and small screens. That same moral compass that guides him could be meant to excuse his actions. This time, though, not even his certainty is enough.
Watching “Narc” now, as America calls into question the very nature of police work, is to watch a film working to make sense of police themselves. In the final scene, as a frantic Tellis scrambles to make sense of the clues pointing him towards his partner, Patric plays the character as a man whose entire value system is crumbling around him. There is no moral grandstanding for Tellis, no moment where he accepts the burden of guilt for the greater good. There is only his breathy pleading – with Oak and their last two suspects – as he tries to rationalize anything that has happened. Whatever actions follow that final cut to black, Tellis is a broken man, and the audience knows it.
In taking a nihilistic view towards the work of undercover police officers, Carnahan’s “Narc” carves out a new path for itself, one that buckles – if not outright breaks – the mode of right and wrong that underpins so many movies before and since. As we begin to reevaluate our relationship with police films, we would do well to include “Narc” in any contemporary watchlist.