L.627

Bertrand Tavernier's grim, melancholy film l.627 acts as an antidote to all those movies that show police work as an exciting fantasy. Here, in the Paris-set story of renegade undercover cop Lulu (Didier Bezace), it is mired in bureaucracy and petty competition among colleagues — even the drug busts are anticlimactic. Tavernier demythologizes cops the same way that John le Carre does spies. Sadly, though, the film lacks drama: Viewers might begin to feel they are on a stakeout — for 145 minutes. C+