Today we see that US television holds an actual monopoly on the adaptations of true stories. But a quarter of a century ago, this wasn’t the case. In the golden age of 1970s Hollywood, directors were often allowed to seek inspiration for their films in current and sometimes very recent events. One such film was Serpico, Sidney Lumet’s account of the real-life New York policeman who fought the police establishment and corruption as well as crime. The Super Cops, made a year later by the famed blaxploitation director Gordon Parks, deals with the same subject and has real-life protagonists too. But the similarities between those two movies cease, because Lumet made a very serious and depressing drama, and Parks took another direction, using that material for light-hearted comedy.
The movie begins with documentary footage that introduces us to the main characters – New York policemen David Greenberg and Robert Hantz (both of whom served as technical advisors and appeared in small cameos in the film). Then we see the beginning of their police careers – after graduating, they were on probation in a traffic unit, but that didn’t prevent Greenberg (played by Ron Leibman) from pursuing his dream of taking drug dealers off the street. Assisted by his partner Hantz (David Selby), he makes a series of arrests while working in plain clothes in his spare time. The police establishment is less impressed with the numerous arrests than with their total disregard of internal police protocol. As a punishment, they are both sent to the 21st Precinct, stationed in the worst crime-ridden and drug-infested part of town. There they would continue their crime-fighting crusade, despite the open animosity of their colleagues and suspicion from their paranoid superior, Captain Krasna (played by Dan Frazer). Their success in putting drug dealers out of business turns them into local legends with the nicknames “Batman” and “Robin”. However, that also brings the attention of powerful local drug bosses who put a contract on their lives.
Comparisons between Serpico and The Super Cops, despite their genre differences, are unavoidable, and that is the main problem with this film. Same as Lumet’s work, The Super Cops has a rather weak plot that doesn’t concentrate on a single chain of events and instead simply depicts years of a police career through a series of anecdotes. Those anecdotes, mostly showing the ingenious and often very funny methods that Greenberg and Hantz employed in order to deceive and arrest criminals, allowed Parks to make a whole series of short but very entertaining action scenes. Unfortunately, those scenes alone weren’t enough to make a coherent story out of them; the script by Lorenzo Semple Jr. simply ignores the private life of the protagonists, and his characters aren’t fleshed out and are often non-existent. Ron Leibman tried to fill that emptiness by playing Greenberg as neurotic, but that often turned into unnecessary over-acting. David Selby, on the other hand, is rather uninterested as his second fiddle. A potentially interesting performance was given by Sheila E. Frazier in the small role of Greenberg’s prostitute informer, but Parks drastically reduced her screen time. By concentrating on the action and ignoring character development, Parks shortened this film to 90 minutes, a quite reasonable length that made the film anything but boring and prevented many viewers from being too annoyed with its numerous flaws. Anyway, the film remains very funny and could also be seen as a product of its times – one of the most hilarious scenes deals with hidden listening devices, a theme very relevant for those who lived through the Watergate era. The Super Cops descended into obscurity, which is quite understandable since the movie was dwarfed by the real genre classics of that era. But, on its own level, it works fine, and today’s audience, faced with usually inferior material of the same genre, would probably appreciate it.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on October 10th 1999)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/84324 Critic: AA
