My personal Bad Cop Film Festival

To serve and protect. That is the mission of law enforcement agencies. By and large they carry out this mission tirelessly and mostly thanklessly, putting life and limb at risk on a daily basis.

But when the proverbial bad apples go wrong, the public, the media and especially Hollywood are fascinated by the spectacle of good guys gone bad. I know I'm fascinated. Because of this fascination, and because such films are usually very good movies, I've often wished that Turner Classic Movies or another cable channel would assemble a Bad Cop Film Festival.

They haven't, so I've decided to do it here.

Accountable to no one

I recently watched director Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992) for the umpteenth time. It belongs near the top of the bad cop movie list, and Harvey Keitel is stunning as the nameless New York City detective lieutenant, reeling through those mean streets, half-crazed on heroin, cocaine and alcohol, sexually predatory, all the while losing his shirt and what's left of his mind in compulsive betting on a Dodgers-Mets playoff series.

Like the anti-heroes in so many bad cop movies, Keitel's lieutenant is accountable to no one, literally above the law because he is the law. He's a true rogue cop. To me, Bad Lieutenant is one film to which all bad-cop movies must pay homage. Director Ferrara also made the cult classic, King of New York, in 1990 with Christopher Walken, perfectly cast as a darkly jaunty white drug king ruling a fiefdom of black dope dealers.

The charming sociopath

That same year, British director Mike Figgis (best known for Leaving Las Vegas) put Richard Gere through his brilliant paces in Internal Affairs as the renegade Los Angeles street cop Dennis Peck, who is relentlessly pursued by Andy Garcia as Raymond Avila, a recent addition to the force's Internal Affairs division.

Gere's Peck is a charming sociopath, quietly running wild, who doesn't hesitate to have his own partner"“ William Baldwin as the tragic Van Stretch"“ shotgunned to death when he appears to be threaten Peck's dark, corrupt world of fast money and easy living. The Peck character is especially disturbing because he seems able to identify and touch and prey on the innate weaknesses of almost everyone he comes in contact with. He's a human jackal in cop blue.

Yet both Keitel's bad lieutenant and Gere's Dennis Peck possess some last remaining shreds of decency and humanity in their inverted worldviews. Keitel makes a last stab at redemption before meeting his violent, pre-ordained death; and Peck is convinced that all his wrongdoing is justified by his support of his large, extended family.

The rookie cop as fall guy

Not so with Alonzo Harris in Training Day (2001), a work by the African-American director Antoine Fuqua. Of all the bad cops in my film festival, Harris comes closest to pure evil, totally beyond redemption. Denzel Washington won a long overdue "Best Actor " Oscar for this role: a fast-talking, cold-blooded stone killer cop stalking Los Angeles with a .45 holstered under each arm and an unremitting agenda of corruption to carry out to the last dollar.

Training Day again portrays a group of wrong cops seemingly accountable to no one but each other. Ethan Hawke masterfully plays against this fraternity of bad apples as Jake Hoyt, a rookie cop whom Harris aims to use as the fall guy in a dope heist under the cover of the training day for which the film is named. The film's ethos is summed up in the indelible scene in which Harris smilingly blows away his dope dealer friend Roger (played by Scott Glenn) with the ubiquitous shotgun and makes off with Roger's million-dollar cache of dope while his cop crew looks on, almost bored. Another day at the venal office.

Parenthetically, Los Angeles seems to be the location for many bad cop movies. Perhaps all that smog-covered sun hatches the plots of corruption dormant in the minds of the worst of the LAPD.

The city as a key actor

And the entire LAPD seems to be corrupt and brutal in L.A. Confidential, the noirish 1997 film directed by Curtis Hanson from the novel by James Ellroy. In the process of following the labyrinthine paths of two California cops in the 1950s, L.A. Confidential pulls aside the Ozzie-and-Harriet curtain of the a'50s to reveal a city and society brimming beneath the surface with the darkest aspects of the human condition.

The hulking New Zealand actor Russell Crowe, in one of his earliest American roles, is perfectly cast as Bud White, an all-purpose cop-goon who specializes in beat-downs of suspected crooks to elicit desperate confessions; and Kevin Spacey is at his sleazy best as Jack Vincennes, a publicity-hungry detective who would steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes.

The city of Los Angeles itself is a key actor in L.A. Confidential, which contains many parallels to Roman Polanski's Los Angeles of the 1930s in his 1974 classic, Chinatown. A Dantean landscape of violence and corruption has always lurked beneath that city's Hollywood/Rodeo Drive flash and filigree.

Crossing way over the line

That is certainly true in William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). This underrated bad-cop masterpiece finds William Petersen (later the star of the popular TV series "CSI") as the wayward Secret Service agent Richard Chance, hounding the master counterfeiter Rick Masters (played by a deadly, charming Willem Dafoe) through L.A.'s high-speed cityscape.

Obsessed with his mission, Chance and his partner cross so far over the line that they inadvertently kill an FBI agent, and Chance's violent death is the ultimate penalty he pays. The score by Wang Chung is the perfect accompaniment to this tale of the dark side of a city and the forces that haunt it.

The lone survivor

Modern-day L.A. is the jumpy, skittery setting for director Chris Fisher's 2005 drama, Dirty, with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Clifton Collins Jr., as former gangbangers-turned-undercover L.A. cops who go wrong in pursuit of the one big score that will get them out of the cesspool of drugs and death in which they find themselves.

Gooding raps the hip-hop slang of the streets like he'd actually grown up there; he's the only male bad cop in my film festival who survives alive. In fact, he is made a cover-up hero by his slimy bosses in a nice ending twist.

Going too far undercover

My last entry is Lili Fini Zanuck's Rush (1991), from the memoir by former undercover cop Kim Wozencraft, with a screenplay by the novelist (and former Philadelphia Daily News columnist) Pete Dexter. Eric Clapton wrote and played the catchy, darkly druggy score.

Kristen Kates, the Wozencraft character played by a fresh young Jennifer Jason Leigh, and her partner, Jim Raynor (Jason Patric) go undercover to bust a dope ring headed by Will Gaines, played with quiet, nonchalant menace by the rock and blues singer Gregg Allman. All goes well until they become dope fiends themselves and get so far into the scene that their boss (the smoothly gravel-voiced Sam Elliott) threatens to pull them. Raynor is assassinated by the bad-cop movie weapon of choice— the shotgun— but Kristen Kates avenges her lover-partner with a bullet to the back of Will Gaines's head. Case closed.

Festival closed.

Did I miss any bad-cop movies? Let me know. I can always make time to watch another one.