Hollywood Crows (2008)

Joseph Wambaugh returns to the eccentric cops he introduced in his warmly received 2006 Hollywood Station in this bummer of a sequel, Hollywood Crows. At the expense of a gripping story, he tries to capture the crazy multicultural melee of Los Angeles (languages spoken: Spanish, Farsi, surfer), where tweakers mix it up with Guatemalan immigrants and over-the-hill rockers. The woolly plot, which involves a woman scheming to off her husband (and vice versa), unfolds as a vague afterthought. Wambaugh also apparently wants to gross us out, tossing in gratuitous scenes of glass eyeballs dipped in Gatorade and feces-smeared corpses. At this goal, alas, he succeeds. C