Yet another international coproduction featuring a Japanese leading man, NEW YORK COP doesn't augur well for the future of Yankee-Rising Sun artistic cooperation. Do American sound as comical in Japanese as Nakamura does mangling English? This is not a racist observation; if an actor has
to spit out salty urban street talk, he must do so intelligibly. After all, the F-word is the Haiku of American cop movies.
Fresh on the Manhattan beat, rookie cop Toshi (Toru Nakamura) frets about fitting into the force's plans for him to go undercover in order to infiltrate Alphabet City gangs. Ridiculed by a contact for overdressing, Toshi gets swept into the crime maelstrom as a Puerto Rican gang shoos him through
several buildings onto the mean streets, where he's rescued by roving sculptress Maria Mendoza (Mira Sorvino). Through this struggling artist, Toshi meets her gangster brother Hawk (Chad McQueen), who leads the gang who tried to kill him. Confounding Hawk's prediction of failure, Toshi uses his
karate skills to extract money owed Hawk by a biker and moves himself inside the gang's inner circle, much to the annoyance of Hawk's ambitious second-in-command Tito (Manny Perez). Meanwhile, hit man Iceman (Chad Coleman) is wiping out undercover cops networking with Toshi, including Konen Li
(Conan Lee), who manages to wound Hawk's main Mafia connection, Mr. C (Tony Sirico) before being murdered. Toshi secures vital info about Hawk's illegal arms sales, but the bust goes sour, and police precinct snitch Marge (Suzanne Tino) comprises future stings. On the heels of rubouts of Toshi's
street liaison and his best buddy Danny Boy (Laurence Mason), Tito backs up his suspicions about Toshi, who has fallen into disfavour with Hawk by sleeping with Maria. When vacillating Hawk backpedals about wanting Toshi dead, Tito eliminates him and takes over the gang. Toshi invades Tito's
powermeeting with Mr. C, kills Tito, shoots out Mr. C's tires (which causes a crash-and-burn), and uses Iceman's own high-tech gun on the cop-killing assassin.
Even if this movie is based on fact, this biographical action pic feels derivative and dispiriting, as if a true story had been photocopied endlessly on the Xerox machine of TV cop show schlock. What emerges is a cloudy facsimile of reality--like SERPICO translated into Japanese and then badly
retranslated back into English. Where is the magnetic pull of a story line involving a complicated web of snitches, boys in the hood, undercover experts, killer capos, etc.? Has any chance for breakneck excitement been sapped by too many routine car chases, mobster meatball stereotyping, and an
insipid cop-meets-good-girl romance? On its own terms, as a souped-up joyride through an urban inferno, NEW YORK COP barely offers enough gratuitous body-bashing to satisfy action junkies. How can you start a genre groupie's heart pumping when none of the bad guys exudes any menace; indeed, the
Hell's Angels here are so out of shape they would probably collapse into Richard Simmons's arms at the first mention of a free diet program. Then there's the Nakamura setback from which any movie could not recover; he kickboxes beautifully but puts his talented feet in his mouth every time he
speaks. Unmagnetic on camera, Nakamura comes across not as an embattled cop but as a slow-burning tourist knocked silly by a martial arts competition he attended a bit too confidently. He's as uncomfortable with leading-man status as he is with English. (Graphic violence, extreme profanity,
extensive nudity, sexual situations, substance abuse.) leave a comment
