Cop Land

GoodFellas meets High Noon on the Jersey Palisades. Written and directed by James Mangold, Cop Land shares with his previous Heavy a socially maladroit central character, but since the character is this time played by Stallone, as the lumbering sheriff of a town run by dirty NYPD cops, the film is certainly worth a look. While the plotting is overly dense and the dialogue occasionally overcooked, there are great pleasures of ensemble to be had here: Keitel playing another, foxier, bad lieutenant; De Niro as a schlumpy but avid internal-affairs investigator; Michael Rapaport as the dumb young policeman who starts the house of cards falling; Ray Liotta, hilarious and moving as a cokehead cop with morals. And Stallone? He holds his own. Perhaps most impressively, he fades into the lineup with the rest. B