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COP LAND

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Annabella Sciorra, Cathy Moriarty, Michael Rapaport

Director James Mangold

Opens Aug. 1

You could call Cop Land the movie that got Rocky fat; you could also call it the movie that persuaded him to slim down. Sure, Stallone gained close to 40 pounds to play Freddy Heflin — a sweet-natured, slow-moving New Jersey law enforcer who's more Dumbo than Rambo — but the role also heralds Stallone's move away from budget-busting action flicks to a prestige $20 million ensemble film that combines the moods of Serpico and Our Town.

Whether Stallone is atoning for the disastrous Judge Dredd and Daylight or simply catching the hip independent wave, he (or at least his agent) seems to have developed comeback king John Travolta's eye for hip scripts. After writer-director Mangold (hot off the minor success of his low-budget character study Heavy) brought his screenplay to producer Cary Woods (Kids) and the project landed at Miramax, it became one of the most talked-about indie scripts since Pulp Fiction. But unlike Quentin Tarantino's irony-soaked triptych, Cop Land ''doesn't have a tongue in its cheek,'' says Mangold. ''It's a morality tale in a very earnest sense.''

Structured like a Western, Cop Land is the story of a New Jersey town that's been settled by a group of xenophobic NYPD officers. When one of them (Rapaport) kills some innocent people on a bridge over the Hudson River, Stallone's local constable and De Niro's internal-affairs investigator start digging into the town's vigilante approach to keeping the peace. As the ugly truth comes to light, Liotta (as a loner cop), Sciorra (as a cop's wife in whom Stallone takes an interest), and Keitel (as a seedy community pasha) choose sides in an old-fashioned clash between good and evil.

One notable moment: the intense tete-a-tete between Mean Streets veterans De Niro and Keitel (''That's probably a big scene that everybody's gonna be looking for,'' says Rapaport); but the most noticeable on-screen element is the extra weight on Stallone. ''He was very self-conscious about it,'' says Sciorra, who predicts that Sly's Raging Bullish weight gain could help him muscle into the Oscar race. ''I remember the first time we met he just said, 'Hi, um, I'm not normally this fat. I'm doing it for the movie.''' If Cop Land succeeds, however, this could be the shape of things to come. UPSIDE Not your typical summer movie. DOWNSIDE Missed its chance to repeat Pulp Fiction history when Miramax couldn't finish the film in time for Cannes.


Posted May 16, 1997 | Published in issue #379 May 16, 1997 | Order Article Reprints