When his partner is gunned down by counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), Secret Service agent Chance (William Petersen) is willing to bend and break every rule to bring him to justice and avenge his friend.
I have heard of this movie for years, but I never had an opportunity to watch it. I have been meaning to re-watch Manhunter, but that review will have to wait. To Live... popped up on the internet, and I was finally able to watch it.
I feel like I need to take a shower. To Live and Die in LA is a mean, nihilistic policier where any moral line between black and whites is riddled with holes and set on fire. Released in 1985, this action thriller takes the loner cop protagonist to its most amoral extreme - Petersen's Chance is so unrelenting he seems to invite his own destruction.
The film opens with two scenes which highlight his near-supernatural attraction to danger - a brief glimpse of a man down a hallway and the sound of cutlery lead Chance into foiling a terrorist attack. In the second sequence, he bungee-jumps off a bridge - the filmmakers hold back on the reveal that he is tethered to a line, making it look like he is jumping to his doom.
Played with cocksure confidence and a frightening level of self-absorption by Petersen, Chance is the polar opposite of his later portrayal of Will Graham in Michael Mann's Manhunter.
In the opposite corner is counterfeiter Masters (Willem Dafoe), another shark in human form who seems to recognise his opponent as kin. Dafoe's paranoid, smirking performance is the perfect counterweight to Petersen's intensity.
The constant references to time act as a countdown to their final showdown.
As the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Chance and Masters are not exceptions - every character is scrabbling to get what they want. Chance and Masters are the most successful are the ones who are willing to do whatever it takes to destroy anyone who gets in their way.
The film is most famous for its car chase, involving Chance and his partner Vukovich (John Pankow) fleeing pursuing vehicles by going against oncoming traffic on the highway. The car chase is so excessive it almost stalls the movie, yet it also provides the key shift in the relationship between Chance and his partner.
For the first half of the movie, I was struck by how piecemeal the scenes were between Chance and Vukovich - it almost felt like we were seeing too little of them in action. The dialogue in particular felt incredibly hackneyed - especially when Chance was talking about his deceased partner. It is dramatically functional, but it put me in the frame of mind that there was not much to be expected from the movie in terms of characterisation (the ridiculously cartoonish terrorist with his sticks of dynamite from the opening sequence did not help).
The combination of the somewhat cliche dialogue and Roddy Muller's camerawork, which kept the characters and action framed in stark wide shots, meant the film's approach was so objective that it was hard to get a lock on what we were supposed to be feeling vis-a-vis the central duo.
The film's emphasis on action is key for defining the characters and their relationships. What I took away from the car chase was Chance's complete disconnect from other people. While Vukovich is freaking out, Chance is focused on getting out of danger. Even after the chase is over, while Vukovich tries to calm down, Chance is busy knocking out the bullet-scarred back window. Cheerfully he tells Vukovich that he does not have to worry about the vehicle - they can just claim the back window was knocked out and get it replaced.
There are no consequences in Chance's world. Not for his partner, civilians or the snitch, Bianca (Debra Feuer) he uses to get close to Masters.
Chance's relationship with Bianca is the movie showing the underbelly of this character - he uses the weight of his position to treat her as his personal sex object. There is no personal-professional boundary to Chance's life - he happily abuses the power of his job to get what he wants. The film does not endorse the character's worldview - there is a sequence where a victorious Chance appears in her apartment and aggressively initiates sex over her protestations.
At the beginning of the movie Chance's original partner criticises him for taking everything personally - and he is proved right. Chance is not motivated by some higher moral purpose - or if he is, he sees Bianca and all the people who he deals with as expedient to that purpose.
I knew of the film's downer ending in advance, but it did not detract from my viewing. In fact, knowing that Chance is not going to make it enhanced the film. Chance is so detached from any sense of his own mortality that it makes sense that his end would come so ignominiously.
Fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, To Live and Die in LA might not be a satire, but its unflinching view of its protagonist feels like an indictment of the fascistic individualism coursing through the genre - there is something exhilarating about it, but Friedkin and his collaborators have no interest in the kind of mythologising and stark morality that was overtaking the action genre in the eighties.
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