Cinema has always had a rich history of corrupt and dirty cops from Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan in “Touch of Evil” through to a highly memorable performance by Gary Oldman as the pill popping DEA agent Stansfield in “Leon” and now Woody Harrelson throws his hat into the ring, as he brings us Dave “Date Rape”Brown, the drug taking, sexist dinosaur of the LAPD.

Set in 1999 were the LAPD is still trying to mend a heavily tarnished reputation in the midst of the fallout from the Rampart Scandal, were over 70 police officers were implicated in some form or another of misconduct including three LAPD officers who were found to be on the payroll of hip-hop modul Marion “Suge” Knight the head of “Death Row Records”, who himself was alleged to be involved in the murder of Notorious B.I.G. something which would later become the key subject of Nick Broomfield’s fantastic “Biggie and Tupac” documentary.

Needless to say Brown is seemingly the one officer they missed, as he rests upon 24 years of questionable glories with the force, happily peddling his made up law cases to argue his point, with his actions always of the opinion that the end justifies the means. Still thanks to delivering a Rodney King style beat down in public view following a minor collision, the aftermath of the incident suddenly threatens to tear his world apart, as he now finds himself not only the focus of his superiors and the local politicians eager to avoid yet another scandal, let alone one which can be viewed as racial discrimination. Meanwhile Brown soon finds his every move under the scrutiny of internal affairs.

After directing Harrelson to an Oscar nomination with “The Messengers” it was really only a matter of time before Director Oren Moverman teamed up with Harrelson again, as he once again pulls out another great performance, from a man better known for his comedic performance than his more serious ones. Still  here Harrelson proves once more that he is more than capable of pulling off more serious roles as he is highly believable here as Brown, a man who thinks nothing of sponging off the charity of his sympathetic ex wives (who are even more bizarrely sisters to boot), while spending his evenings cruising for (nausea inducing for the audience) casual sex and popping pills, while constantly fighting his own demons which constantly threaten to consume him, while his day to day life appears to be nothing more than a well rehearsed performance, especially with his eldest daughter refusing to even acknowledge him as her father.

Sadly this character here has been seen far too many times before to prove effective with the usual shock tactics on offer here, especially with little in the way of a memorable edge, while even more crucially when this sort of splintered character has just been done a lot better in the likes of the aforementioned “Leon” as well as Harvey Keitel’s highly memorable performance as The Lieutenant in “Bad Lieutenant”, meaning that for all of the rule breaking that we see Brown performing, it can’t but have an overwhelming feeling of Déjà Vu, something not even prevented with legendry crime writer James Ellroy co writing the script. However considering that Ellroy also worked on the scripts for both “Dark Blue” and “Street Kings” it’s safe to say that his ability as a fiction writer does not carry across to his ability as a screenwriter, especially with his strongest film “LA Confidential” being adapted straight from his book, without any involvement from Ellroy himself.

While undoubtedly this is Harrelson’s movie, he still receives some fantastic support from the likes of Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon who continues to carve out a career for herself playing fascinating and frequently explosive  characters, with her role here as Barbara, the more stronger willed of the two sisters providing the much needed counterpart to Brown’s manipulating ways. Moverman also reunites Harrelson with his co-star from “The Messengers” Ben Foster, who is once again on great form here as a homeless veteran, while he continues to maintain great screen chemistry with Harrelson with the scenes between their characters being amongst the strongest. More frustrating is the likes of Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver who are given glorified yet memorable cameo appearances which only makes it more frustrating that they are not used more and instead left to become yet another random plot strand.

It’s worth noting that although the film is called “Rampart” it has nothing to do with the Rampart scandal, which you can’t help but feel would have made a more interesting movie than this turned out to be, especially with plot lines being frequently started, but rarely brought to any form of satisfactory conclusion, as they frequently seem to be added purely for the purpose of padding out what already feels like a drawn out running time, let alone the fact that Director Moverman seemingly could find no way of making the central story gripping enough to be the sole focus, without feeling the need of adding additional schemes for Brown to be caught up in or when this fails making questionable attempts to dissect his character. Needless to say I frequently found my mind wondering else were and in particular trying to work out how much longer it had to run, especially when this kind of story has been done before and better on “The Shield” which Moverman has seemingly taken his shooting style from with the frequent use of documentary style shaky cameras and frequent static shots behind the heads of characters.

From the opening fifteen minutes I honestly thought I was going to love this movie, though sadly seeing how it continued past that point and I frequently found instead the whole experience to be increasingly tedious, especially when it finds itself with no real link to its namesake scandal. Meanwhile for all the posturing and foul language that Harrelson can muster, it’s not enough to make the film standout as anything regarding memorable, especially when it’s antihero is as unlikable as he is, it only makes the fact that we have to spend the whole film with him frequently verges on being unbearable and I would much rather have dug out “Bad Lieutenant” again than sat though this overblown mess of a film, which ultimately proved to be one of the first big disappointments of 2012.