Den­nis Hopper’s Col­ors may be a buddy cop flick on the sur­face, but it’s hardly typ­i­cal high-concept Hol­ly­wood mate­r­ial. It does have a token over­ar­ch­ing plot (involv­ing a mis­matched pair of cops trac­ing the per­pe­tra­tors of a drive-by shoot­ing), but it’s merely a loose thread to hold the movie together. If nei­ther a char­ac­ter study nor a plot-driven thriller, Col­ors is a por­trait of an issue, a set­ting, a problem.

A pro­to­type for the HBO series The Wire, Col­ors is actu­ally a por­trait of the dete­ri­o­rated, hope­less sit­u­a­tion in a failed Amer­i­can city lost to gangs and the drug trade. But unlike The Wire, which deeply explores the eco­nom­ics of how and why gangs func­tion as orga­ni­za­tions, Col­ors doesn’t offer much detail on how they oper­ate and what they do. How­ever sen­si­tive and bal­anced Col­ors may be, it still takes the point of view of pre­dom­i­nantly white law enforce­ment. As such, it’s easy to see why film­mak­ers shortly turned to films like Men­ace II Soci­ety (read The Dork Report review) and Boyz N the Hood (read The Dork Report review), which would look at some of the same issues from the other side of the milieu.

Sean Penn in Col­ors: “You don’t wanna get laid, man. It leads to kiss­ing and pretty soon you gotta talk to ‘em.”

The inter­est­ing title most obvi­ously refers to the term for a nation’s flag(tying in with the themes of war and the insti­tu­tion that wage it) or the sig­na­ture col­ors of three major war­ring L.A. gangs: the Bloods (red), Crips (blue), and a Latino gang (white). The real col­ors that divide these groups are, of course, race. The one sign of equal­ity in late 80s L.A. is that nearly every­one calls each other Holmes.

The nar­ra­tive is loosely hung on sev­eral cliches, most notably the trope of vet­eran cop sad­dled with rookie part­ner. Offi­cer Hodges (Duvall) is bit­ter at being drafted into the L.A.P.D. C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang pro­gram, after a life­time of ser­vice that ought to have qual­i­fied him for sen­si­ble hours, a safe desk job, and more time with his fam­ily. Offi­cer McGavin (Penn) is an aggres­sive, preen­ing dandy, eager to attack the gang prob­lem with the blunt tool of incarceration.

Robert Duvall in Col­ors: “you got a prob­lem with the whole fuckin’ world, and I’m in it.”

But it’s not long after the movie sets up these cliches that it begins to knock them down. The osten­si­bly wiz­ened Hodges makes a crit­i­cal mis­take, set­ting free a young gang­banger on the assump­tion that a brush with the law would scare him straight, while simul­ta­ne­ously intend­ing it to be a les­son to the head­strong book ‘em-type McGavin. The punk turns out to have been a major player in the shoot­ing. Another cliché short-circuited: McGavin romances a local girl from the bar­rio (Maria Con­chita Alonso), but she turns out to be far from the madonna he imag­ined. Not only that, she rejects him anyway.

Col­ors ends on a very down beat, not just the death of a sig­nif­i­cant char­ac­ter, but what comes after. McGavin is forced into the posi­tion of impart­ing wis­dom before he’s earned much him­self. The film ends with a long shot held on his face (echoed much later in the final shot of mind Michael Clay­ton — read The Dork Report review) as he most likely pon­ders his ineffectiveness.

Of note are early appear­ances by Don Chea­dle and Damon Wayans, the lat­ter fea­tur­ing in a stand-out sur­real sequence in which his char­ac­ter T-Bone is out of his mind on drugs. Her­bie Hancock’s score has not dated well, nor has the vin­tage rap sound­track, includ­ing the angry theme song by Ice-T. The open­ing cred­its are set to “One Time One Night” by the local L.A. band Los Lobos.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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