MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Internal Affairs’: Glowers, Glares and a Perfectly Cast Gere

Even at 40, Richard Gere has such a sensual smoothie’s face--like an evil grown-up boy with glittering eyes and an omnipresent cheek-tweaking smile--that he’s perfect casting for the sexy bad cop in the nervous, shallow cop thriller “Internal Affairs” (citywide).

Gere’s role, corrupt Dennis Peck, is an LAPD street cop, high-roller and all-around hedonist. Gere hasn’t done a pure heavy like this since 1977’s “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”--and he plays Peck with relish: a happy, sly, sure-footed stud killing and conniving his way to the juiciest plums. Peck wears an omnipresent cocky, intimate grin, and he’s so perpetually pleased with himself, he’s such a master at pushing psychological buttons, he can talk almost anybody into almost anything. When that fails, he turns ruthless, whips out a gun or a choke-hold. Gere makes him a carnally hip seducer rotten with buoyant malice and sleek, rough-trade dandyism.

The movie itself is another doppleganger melodrama, about cops and crooks having interchangeable personalities. Here, the man chasing Peck--Andy Garcia as Internal Affairs investigator Raymond Avila--gets so obsessed, he begins taking on Peck’s personality, turning ruthless and seductive. When Peck goes after Avila’s wife (Nancy Travis), leering and tossing around sadistic-erotic hints like Robert Mitchum’s reptilian rapist in “Cape Fear,” the circle is joined. Peck is the man who seduces everybody. When he can’t, as with Avila’s Lesbian partner Amy (Laurie Metcalf), he may as well try to kill them.

There are all kinds of possibilities here for a classy, glossy thriller with dark undercurrents, but the movie fumbles them. It’s fitfully exciting, erratically absorbing. But, scudded along on its smooth surfaces, you’re always aware of chances muffed and cliches embraced.

Strangely, director Mike Figgis, who cooked up a lurid, smoky film noir stew of a style in “Stormy Monday,” doesn’t do much with Los Angeles here, even though his cinematographer, John Alonzo, once shot “Chinatown.” The streets look flat and bright, empty and monotonous, like a stage set where everyone is waiting for the dry ice and steam to arrive. The first half of “Affairs” seems unusually set-bound. Then, suddenly we’re deluged with car chases, murders and double-murders.

The plot construction is erratic, almost as if scenarist Henry Bean had written all the scenes, and then shuffled them--and the ending looks like another absurd last-minute tack-on. There’s a thread here, but it develops High Concept-style, hopping along like an amphetamine-driven kangaroo. Only a few things hold it all together: Gere’s bent villainy, an interesting jazz-rock score by Figgis , Anthony Marinelli and Brian Banks and the movie’s leitmotif of glowering and glaring. Garcia has a drilling, killing stare that looks like a cartoon buzzard. Metcalf tops him; she has the sullen, eye-shadow stare of a robot grouch, programmed to humiliate. Meanwhile, Gere twinkles, smirks and flirts, as if he wanted to get an orgy going.

Gere, Garcia and Metcalf are all magnetic actors and a battle of wits among them should be fascinating. But the battle here is half-witted. By the end of the film, Peck seems completely crazy, trying to pull off murderous stunts and scams no one could manage, juggling so many villainous balls--including a murder-for-hire and complicated financial swindles--that they’re bound to tumble.

What keeps things interesting are the two leads and a supporting actor or two, like Metcalf and yeoman Richard Bradford, wasted again as a growly superior. The story itself floats away half-way through--leaving them all to glower and glare, dodge cars and bullets and wait for the inevitable last-stand crisis. Lost too is a potentially compelling theme: “Quis Custodiet” or “Who will keep the keepers themselves?”

“Internal Affairs” (rated R for sex, violence, language) seems to be reaching for something new--and near the end, there’s a moment of black lunacy during Peck’s rampage that suggests it’s twisting toward nightmare comedy. But it never cuts loose. No matter how much come-hither villainy Gere generates, or how much envy and menace Garcia throws back at him, they’re still trapped there in that bare, empty story, waiting for the dry ice and the steam to arrive.