Sound and fury, signifying genre

Jason Patric and Ray Liotta do a whole lot of shouting in the new film “Narc,” but I wonder if the two actors ever sat down together and quietly went over the script. If they had, they might have noticed that director Joe Carnahan’s story about a pair of tough Detroit cops had been cobbled from the remains of so many other genre movies that there wasn’t much to hang onto save borrowed cliches and attitude. Then again, perhaps that’s precisely why the two spend so much of the film with the volume turned up: They don’t want us to hear the words, only the noise.

“Narc” is nothing if not loud. The frenetic opening scene finds Patric’s character, an undercover narcotics detective named Nick Tellis, mad-dashing after a drug-addled freak as a hand-held camera dogs their every step. The freak -- eyeballs rolling, bullet-head gleaming, two long needles clenched in one fist -- is so high he’s barely touching the ground yet not so high he doesn’t notice another man just passing through. The druggie plunges the needles into the bystander’s neck, the guy drops in a foamy spasm and Nick throws himself down in a futile attempt to help. Then he’s off running again, chasing his prey all the way to the playground, where he nearly upends his career by shooting the wrong person.

This nerve-jangling opener bristles with wild style. The sound is a syncopation of footfalls and heavy breathing, and the herky-jerky cinematography, which brings to mind the Dogma film “Celebration,” amplifies the sense of risk. Both the camera and the cop look as if they might lose it (each seems out of control), but that’s just part of the pose. Like Al Pacino in “Serpico” and Russell Crowe in “L.A. Confidential,” Nick is the departmental rebel who always runs afoul of the system. At once inside and outside the law, he carries his existential solitude right next to his badge and gun, although in this case he’s also hauling a load of familiar pulp fiction.

After the playground shooting, Nick is pulled out of narcotics and put on a murder investigation with an older cop named Henry Oak (Liotta), the type of oversized swaggering rule-breaker for which Nick Nolte once held the patent in movies like “Q&A.;” (Over and over, every gesture and character in “Narc” summons up yet another movie.) Together the cops tear Detroit apart, terrorizing snitches in grubby apartments and in the bombed-out vistas that now define the city’s cinematic landscape. Even with the ending in sight, it takes a long time for anything to happen. Henry lectures Nick on the difference between law and justice; Nick stares into space (Patric excels at such meaningful emptiness) as his incessantly irritating wife (Krista Bridges) nags him to quit the force.

In movies like these, women tend to be either prostitutes or wives, and the wives tend to be scolds or dead. That’s part of the pulp fiction territory, which, however finite, offers up worlds of possibility. Carnahan, whose first feature was a raucous, self-conscious crime blowout called “Blood Guts Bullets & Octane,” has a true believer’s love of pulp. But love isn’t enough when you are playing movie cops and robbers. To transcend cliche, movies like “Narc” need the passion of a heretic who can take stock characters with their stock predicaments and turn them inside out, the way Curtis Hanson and Quentin Tarantino do. Blood, guts and flash aren’t enough.

It’s during a stakeout when Henry tells Nick about his dead wife that the cliches and Carnahan’s wild style reach an absurd crescendo. The two cops are inside a parked car -- Henry in the front seat, Nick for some reason in the back -- and the camera is prowling outside. Dark lighting obscures both cops and, rather than focus on Liotta’s face during one of the actor’s bigger big moments, Carnahan has instead focused on some overhanging trees crisply reflected in the car windows. As he does throughout the movie, Liotta works hard to put his character across, but it doesn’t matter: You can’t see the acting for either the trees or the cinematography.

*

‘Narc’

MPAA rating: R for strong brutal violence, drug content and pervasive language.

Times guidelines: Excessively brutal and filled with obscenities, the film includes an upsetting scene in which a pregnant woman is shot in the belly.

Jason Patric...Nick Tellis

Ray Liotta...Henry Oak

Busta Rhymes...Beery

Chi McBride...Captain Cheevers

Krista Bridges...Audrey Tellis

Paramount Pictures and Lions Gate Films present a Cruise/Wagner production in association with Splendid Pictures, Emmett Furla Films and Julius R. Nasso Productions and Tiara Blu Films, a Joe Carnahan Film, released by Paramount Pictures. Director and writer Joe Carnahan. Producers Diane Nabatoff, Ray Liotta, Michelle Grace, Julius R. Nasso.Director of photography Alex Nepomniaschy. Production designers Greg Beale, Taavo Soodor. Editor John Gilroy. Costume designer Gersha Phillips. Music Cliff Martinez. Running time: One hour, 47 minutes.

Exclusively at: Arclight, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood (323) 464-4226; Loews Century Plaza Cinemas, 2040 Avenue of the Stars, Century City, (310) 553-4291; Mann Criterion 6, 1313 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 248-6266.