Exploring the lighter side of homicide

In Hollywood Homicide Harrison Ford plays Joe Gavilan, a veteran Los Angeles detective with money troubles, three ex-wives and a goofy, undisciplined young partner. Gavilan, in other words, is a walking cop-movie cliche, something Ford seems happy to acknowledge.

He slips into the role as if it were a pair of well-worn loafers, the left inherited from Peter Falk, the right from Clint Eastwood, and then proceeds, with wry nonchalance, to tap-dance, shuffle and pirouette through his loosest, wittiest performance in years. It has been a long time since his gift for comedy -- evident in the first Star Wars and Indiana Jones pictures, and also in Mike Nichols' Working Girl -- has peeked out from behind that clenched, morose action-hero face. Ford can be as gruff, decisive or brave as a given dramatic situation demands, but he is also sarcastic, foolish and, in his laconic, leathery way, downright silly.

Gavilan is the kind of character that Ron Shelton, who directed Hollywood Homicide (and wrote it with Robert Souza), has made something of a specialty. Shelton's movies often show a mocking appreciation for underachieving, no-longer-young men whose failures and compromises give them a rough, self-deprecating wisdom and a slow-burning, grown-up charm. Kevin Costner, before he was swallowed up by his own self-righteousness, perfected this type in Bull Durham and revisited it in Tin Cup. In Dark Blue, released this year, Kurt Russell laid bare the vanity and corruption underneath the scruffy, hangdog charm of a similar kind of man and reminded the few people who saw the film that, when he feels like it, he can be as disciplined and magnetic as any actor his age.

Though Hollywood Homicide takes place, like Dark Blue, in the seamier sections of the Los Angeles Police Department's bureaucracy, it is a jauntier, breezier picture; it wears its cynicism about individual and institutional ethics lightly. Shelton has a sure, understated feel for the colliding, overlapping subcultures of Los Angeles, a city that, through his eyes, offers unlimited opportunities for envy, self-invention and delusional ambition. Everyone is pretending to be -- or wishing to be -- someone else.

Neither Gavilan nor his young partner, K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett), is entirely satisfied with police work. Gavilan, who once attended a real estate seminar, juggles police professionalism with dubious deal making, while Calden moonlights as a yoga instructor and dreams, like every other halfway good-looking guy in town, of becoming an actor. Hartnett, in what might be called, thinking back on Bull Durham, the Tim Robbins protege role, matches Ford's shambling irritability with a smooth, deceptive sweetness. Calden is an effortless seducer; his yoga students take his gentle dimness for spiritual elevation, and you can't be certain they're altogether wrong.

Gavilan and Calden's big case -- a quadruple homicide at a hip-hop club -- plunges them into the underside of the music business, which someone once said was invented to make the movie industry look good. Here, it is a demimonde of disposable celebrity and limitless greed, embodied by a label owner named Antoine Sartain (Isaiah Washington) who, when it comes to enforcing contracts, seems to think that executive is a synonym for executioner.