Downtown

Relentlessly bland and hopelessly unfunny, Downtown follows straight-laced cop Alex Kearney (Anthony Edwards) as he’s demoted to a station smack-dab in the worst part of town – with the movie detailing the character’s ongoing efforts at ingratiating himself with his angry new partner (Forest Whitaker’s Dennis Curren). (The two men eventually team up to take down an assortment of corrupt police officers and politicians, in a storyline that remains woefully underdeveloped from start to finish.) Filmmaker Richard Benjamin, working from a screenplay by Nat Maudlin, establishes Downtown‘s less-than-engrossing atmosphere right from the get-go, as the movie kicks off with a dull opening stretch that proves hopelessly ineffective at capturing the viewer’s interest – with the tedious vibe compounded by a total lack of developed (or even interesting) characters. (Edwards, for example, proves utterly unable to transform his one-dimensional figure into anything more than a caricature of a cheerful go-getter.) The middling, interminable narrative ensures that it remains impossible to connect to or sympathize with the protagonists’ continuing exploits, while the half-baked nature of the villains’ endeavors paves the way for a final stretch that’s as pointless as it is tedious. (There is, at least, an undeniably memorable death for one of the baddies.) It’s finally impossible to muster up an ounce of enthusiasm for the mostly interminable Downtown, which is a shame, certainly, given the palpable potential afforded by the cast and promising setup.

* out of ****