Cat & Mouse

Cops don’t really watch cop films or TV shows. Before I retired I never saw one episode of Law & Order, CSI, or Third Watch. Us cops used to say “why watch it if we’re living it.” Most cop films/TV shows don’t depict ‘the job’ as it really is, anyway. But now that I’m retired I’ve been catching up on these cop shows, and I usually find myself talking back at the screen “we can’t do that” “that would never happen.” The biggest culprit is CSI: Las Vegas/Miami/New York. Let me explain a crime scene, at least in NYC, and from my experience: At the scene of a homicide both patrol cops and detectives interview witnesses. If the perp is on the scene sometimes it’s the patrol cop who makes the arrest. However, if the perp has fled the scene then the arrest is handled by the precinct detectives. Eventually, Crime Scene Unit (CSU) shows up…who are usually two cops, middle-aged, overweight, and they sure-as-hell don’t look like fashion models. CSU will gather evidence, take photos, take measurements, draw diagrams, dust for fingerprints, and then they’d hand the evidence over to the crime lab personnel, who are civilians with college degrees, and they don’t carry guns. And unlike the TV counterparts, the crime lab people do not visit crime scenes, interrogate suspects, investigate leads, or make arrests.

Here’s another beef of mine: TV/film detectives. A real-life detective is not a supervisor. He’s a regular cop in a suit & tie with investigative status. He cannot boss an uniform patrol cop around. And, in real life, if a detective ever spoke to me the way the detective-characters speak to uniform cop-characters on Law & Order, CSI, or in films like Spike lee’s Inside Man, there’d be one heck of a fight.

But, if you like cop stories, the best police-action-films come from Hong Kong cinema. They’re slick, metropolitan, fast-paced dramas with rapid gun battles,aerobatic stunts, with or without martial arts, and alotta violence. Most of these films require a high level of “suspension of disbelief,” especially when the chase/escape scenes border on the magical. There is usually a complicated relationship between the cop & the bad guy, a cat & mouse game of wits that resolves into a mutual respect for their opponent. Hollywood knows a good thing, and some of HK’s best of the best is reassembled for American audiences. For example, Martin Scorsese’s film The Departed is a remake of Infernal Affairs, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is a play-by-play copy of Ringo Tam’s City on Fire (come to think of it, all of QT films, from the editing to the dialogue and pacing, are heavily influenced by Hong Kong cinema).

My recommended list of Hong Kong action-cop films, are: Running Out of Time, Full Time Killer, The Mad Detective, Infernal Affairs, Time & Sand, A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head, Full Contact, and Hard Boiled. ~ AA