The Worst Film Ever

Sadly Over-hyped

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

**SPOILERS** Tough talking and hard hitting undercover NYPD cop Eddie Ryan, Robert Duvall, goes a bit too far by working over this innocent Puerto Rican party goer whom he causes to jump to his death off a six floor building. This all happens in the first five minutes in the film "Badge 373", Eddie Ryan's police badge number, during an outrageous bust of a Puerto Rican social club where the worst thing going on there is a little pot smoking by some of the party goers.Suspended from the police department Eddie soon gets involved with this nationalist Puerto Rican group from the Bronx who are in the process of starting an armed revolt in their homeland. Supplied by a Harvard educated Puerto Rican hoodlum called Sweet William, Henry Darrow, the revolutionaries are expecting a shipment of over $3,000,000.00 in arms to achieve their aim.It turns out almost by accident that Eddie's partner officer Gigi Caputo, Louis Cusentino, got involved with this hooker Rita Garcia, Marina Dorell, while he was on suspension that lead to Gigi's murder. Gigi through Rita somehow got in cahoots with both Sweet William and the Puerto Rican revolutionaries and became a willing accomplice in their arms running racket. Eddie making it a point to avenge his late partners murder gets his unsuspecting girlfriend Maureen,Verna Bloom, involved with his personal crusade that in the end gets her killed as well by the revolutionaries.Eddie for his part goes all out, without a badge or the authority behind it, to stop Sweet William and his Puerto Rican revolutionaries headed by Rita's brother Ruban played by Fellipe Luciano, one of the founders of the Young Lords, from accomplishing their aims. During the course of the film Eddie gets worked over by the revolutionaries who after a wild car bus chase who, despite Eddie putting some dozen of them away, just put him in the hospital with a couple of broken bones.The film comes to it's very predictable final with Eddie getting the lowdown to where the arms supply is to be loaded on to, a freighter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Catching the freighter's crew with it's pants down Eddie has them panic where Sweet William in a fit of insane rage guns down a totally befuddled Ruban Garcia who was killed just for having an emotional breakdown! Ruban just lost it's when the boat took off without the precious arms on board. Sweet Williams then wildly shoots up the fleeing freighters crew who had finally realized just what a bunch of lunatics, Sweet Williams & Co, that they were dealing with.With the entire Brooklyn North police force showing up at the port all they could do is just watch Eddie climb up, on a 150 foot crane, after a hysterical and totally out of it Sweet William for the films final and talky showdown. We get the usual BS story from Sweet Williams in how he lived better then any of those, the perusing cops, ever dream of living. Sweet William also hints that he'll be back,dead or alive, to continue the revolution even if it ends up killing him! This brain numbing harangue goes on and on until Eddie, with Sweet William unarmed and no threat to anyone, finally blows him away just to stop Sweet William from talking Eddie the police and movie audience to death with his boring and endless dialog.Sub-par "French Connection" follow up with the real hero of the "French Connection" Eddie Egan, as Eddie Ryan's friend and boss Lt. Scanlon, in the cast. Robert Duvall was a bit hard to take as suspended policeman Eddie Ryan taking on persons, by two's three's and even four's, twice as big as he is. Henry Darrow as ex-Puerto Rican hood and now full time freedom fighter Sweet William was a lot more effective in the little time that he was in the movie. The unrelenting violence as well as x-rated and racist dialog in the movie, by its screen writer the ultra-liberal newspaper columnist Pete Hamill, was so laughable and off the wall that it came across more comical, how could anyone take it seriously, then anything else.

This film is over 30 years old,its attitudes are disgracefully non - PC. That is a given.It's not like today when everybody loves one another and we all live in harmony in a Rainbow Nation and all creeds and races co - exist in an atmosphere of mutual respect.Well,don't they? Things aren't a lot different in 2006,it's just that Hollywood likes to make us think they are.I'm not saying for a minute that it's right that things have barely changed in 30 years,but no amount of wishing will make it so.Professional criminals still hide their activities behind the poor and disenfranchised of their own communities,ferment trouble for their own advantage and cops like Eddie Ryan still hate them bitterly for doing it.Laws meant to protect the weak and vulnerable still shelter the cruel and ruthless.If Eddie Ryan,like Harry Callaghan before him,feels like chucking in his badge then he cannot altogether be blamed.Not that he gets a chance as his bosses pre-empt him. Clearly certain members of the Hispanic community are not shown in an exceptionally positive light in "Badge 373" and Mr Ryan is a baad baaad man,homophobic,racist,sexist and probably several other ists as well.but he does not exist in a vacuum,he merely reflects the society he lives in.I would suggest that a significant proportion of the population held attitudes not a thousand miles away from his and considered them to be perfectly acceptable. So here we are in 2006 tsk tsking about a film that shows a society whose views we don't approve of.They were times of social unrest,when there appeared to be a real threat to the status quo.Criminals took advantage of the turmoil and it was difficult to tell the man with a grievance from the man with a gun. "Badge 373" occupies quite an important position in the "Cop Movie" pantheon.It has obvious similarities to "The French Connection" but lacks TFC's sheer energy and inventiveness.It broke new ground in showing the cop / hero as a distinctly unpleasant person - something "The Shield" has made a virtue of.Your cop could now be dirty(Dirty Harry wasn't actually "dirty" was he),unprepossessing,inarticulate and amoral.Mr Robert Duval created a pugnacious objectionable ignorant cop we aren't supposed to admire,but one that we can believe in.He has been corrupted by the world he moves in and works by its rules,not those of respectable society.He is a wreck of a man,like "The Bad Lieutenant". "Badge 373"'s influence reaches a long way,you can't make a cop movie today without at least sub-consciously referring to it. It may look a bit cheap and shoddy by today's mega-budget standards and much of it may seem familiar,but remember you are looking at it from the wrong end of time's telescope.

Robert Duvall is one of my favorite people to watch on screen. He doesn't have a tremendously deep bag of tricks, but he's serious and earnest and I hope he keeps working for a long, long time. I say this partly because he's good and he has some more penance to do to make up for Badge 373, a perfect zero of a cops and robbers flick.What was Duvall thinking when he made this clichéd glob of TVish trash? He was coming off the glory of The Godfather. Did he just sign anything he could get his hands on thinking that with his stellar performance as Tom Hagen, people would flock to see him in anything? There's absolutely nothing likable about this movie. I enjoyed the big, muscular cars of the early 70's, but that's not enough to keep one's attention span from snapping pretty darn quickly. The cinematography was lifeless, the color was garish, the pacing and plotting and canned music were all dull, and there wasn't a single person, plot device, or line of dialogue that was the slightest bit interesting.I didn't care about Duvall's Eddie Ryan. The only character who even showed up on my radar was Verna Bloom, Ryan's girlfriend. She's a big, painted zoftig woman who looks utterly different in High Plains Drifter and Animal House. I liked her, but all she can do is squeal her Brooklyn accent, get hurt by Eddie, and die dramatically.The rest of the movie is just so much clichéd nonsense with one scene stacked on top another, giving Duvall a chance to spurt racial epithets, threaten revenge for his murdered partner (Oh, you didn't see it coming that Ryan's partner gets killed early on? Duh!), get thumped in a ludicrous bus/Puerto Rican gangster chase scene, practice to shoot with his left hand, drive some really cool Dodges and Plymouths, and have the worst case of thought bubble flashbacks to remind him and us why he's just going to have to blast the head bad guy when he corners him on some sort of crane.Howard Koch did some really good work in his career; here he directs an astonishingly bad mixture of R-rated cop movie and TV drama. The whole thing just looks so cheap and silly and you have to wonder just how many good movies Duvall will still need to make to cleanse his soul of the sin of Badge 373.

At some stage during the movie, all cop "on the edge" dramas have to have the obligatory 'give me your badge and your gun' scene. - When Badge 373 started with this, I just knew I was in for a good time. Duvall is magnificent as Eddie Ryan - cop on a mission - and from the "Chocolate covered speedway" remark to the bus chase - he is simply the epitome of "TOUGH COP".