When you look at Stephen Dorff you always think of him as the guy who should be a bigger star than what he currently is. He’s talented and has appeared in a handful of films and if Somewhere had managed to find a bigger audience he could’ve been able to touch upon something more. He’s got all of the tools to be a bigger star; he’s charismatic and has had some solid genre work but for some reason he’s never connected with audiences. But he still has something to offer which is why he can be the lead character in a film like Officer Down.
Detective Callahan (Dorff) is a cop who once as dirty as the night is long. But one night he got shot in the line of duty, ostensibly in the pursuit of dirty deeds, and it changed him into a good man and better husband/father apparently. But no good deed goes unpunished, of course, as he’s lured into a seedy world of strip clubs, drug deals and rapist pedophiles.
And it’s weird to think of this as a straight to video film. It has a fairly strong cast of notable, but not high level, names and it has all the production values of something that would find its way into theatres. But one thing clearly prevented it: it’s just not that good.
This is a film that suffers because it’s poorly written and the film never really recovers from it. There’s something to be mined here about the redemption of a man who’s done bad things, of course, but the film gets too heavily involved in the DTV brand of twists at every turn that change the film radically each time around that after a while it gets hard to follow. It leaves the film, which could’ve been a lot better in a more straightforward manner, as just another DTV crime thriller that doesn’t do much more than occupy 90 minutes of your life in a way that won’t make you regret it. It won’t make you remember it as something special, either.
There are no extras.
Officer Down is pretty standard DTV fair as a crime thriller.
Anchor Bay presents Officer Down . Directed by Brian Miler. Written by John Chase. Starring Stephen Dorff, Dominic Purcell, David Boreanaz, Souljaboy, Stephen Lang, James Woods, Walton Goggins Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R. Released: January 22, 2013. Available at Amazon.com.
