Here's a superb dramatic thriller with a very realistic focus on issues like racism, cultural and religious intolerance, and the raw side of being a policeman. In "Homicide" Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a detective over so many pressures, already on the run trying to find a cop killer (Ving Rhames) when he's called to take over a homicide case, the murder of a Jewish lady in what appears to be a robbery in her shop in a poor neighborhood. Since he was the first detective at the crime scene and the one who reported the incident, he's told by his bosses to forget about the other case and keep working on this one; besides these facts he's also Jewish but a non practicant one. As one of those strange twists of fate, the reluctant Bobby will confront himself in his own way of thinking about his religion which he always neglected for seeing himself as part of something weak; and he also enters in conflict with his self and his views of his work during the course of both investigations, which affects his whole way of seeing things how they really are. Writer and director David Mamet manages to skillfully pull the strings of so many backgrounds and worlds without downplaying situations or disappointing the viewers. Everything works in a perfect tense mood; the pieces are well connected and the ability of surprising the audience is incredibly well done but it only works if the viewers fully understand the movie's premise and the real message behind the case rather than only paying attention to the investigations and the action scenes. One of my favorite scenes is the one where Bobby meets a Rabbi who fears more of his badge than his gun, and he reveals what Bobby really is, in being born as Jew but who can't read words in Hebrew; the turning point for the detective to see what he really is. Mantegna comes with one of his best performances as the hard working detective who at the end of the film realizes how insignificant his instincts were, since he end up betrayed by himself for not seeing that the whole missing piece in this crime puzzle was already in front of him. Also here with a great performance is William H. Macy, playing Mantegna's tough partner. There's so much to be said about "Homicide" but it's better not or I'll spoil the amazing surprises this movie has. 10/10

I just saw Homicide for the first time and I was quite impressed. It is very much a Mamet film, film about men and their world, with a setting that fits a B film but a deeper message that reaches (and sometimes over reaches) for the stars. I often find my self thinking, why is this man, this talent picking this subject when he wants to make something profound and beautiful? But then you just can't take your eyes of the professionalism and you find your self being dragged into an ultra masculine world full of shallow and surprisingly deep meanings, side by side.Homicide is one of his deeper films but it is impossible to talk about why it is good without revealing the end of the film, so SPOILERS! There are not many films about a detective who does not solve the case, who starts running in the wrong direction and looses him self on the way. That alone is praiseworthy. What is even rarer is to find a film that manages to make that mean something, give that a deeper meaning. I believe the film is quite postmodern. We can't look for the truth without taking some of our self into that search. Sometimes it just colors our conclusions but at other times it takes us into the wrong direction. Here is a hero looking for a self identity and he mixes that up into the case and gets the wrong answers. The word he was looking for had nothing to do with the case. It was just pigeon seeds. No conspiracy, nothing. Just like everyone told him, someone desperate looking for money. The scary thing is that we all do this, every single day of the year. When we listen to the news, when we justify our actions, when we help our friends. We filter what we hear and see through what we know and hold dear. What comes out is never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It might resemble the truth, if we are lucky! END OF SPOILERS!!!This film is not without faults. It feels like a stage play at times. You can feel that Mamet has not managed to lave the theatre behind even though the film is quite visual. The problem is the acting. It is not bad, it's just not film acting, if you get my drift.

There's a scene in Homicide when a police detective uses the phone in the library of a moneyed Jewish doctor who's grumbled about shots being fired on the roof. The detective begrudges being pulled off a high-profile drug bust because the influential doctor has asked for him. If we had the same amount of time and space to contemplate what we say as it does to write it, we'd all sound like writers. And standing at the phone, the detective lets loose a rigidly interlaced, giftedly prearranged, impeccably performed river of four-letter vulgarities and anti-Semitic comments. Only Mamet could write, and maybe only his then favorite actor Mantegna could play, this dialogue so frankly and persuasively, and yet with such spoken fluency that it has the autonomy of ad-libbing. Then the cop turns around...and he sees that he's not alone in the room. The doctor's daughter, in one of Rebecca Pidgeon's strongest, and smallest, performances, has heard every coarse, vinegary word. She knows something we also know: This cop's Jewish himself. And because she heard him, she compels him to face what he's actually saying.Set in a nameless, menacing city that's all antiquated storefronts and squat apartment buildings, this low-key but complex web of enigma and suspicion reminiscent of the dialogue-driven narratives of classic Hollywood, is about a man awakening to himself. As the story begins, Detective Bobby Gold, the Mantegna character, is a cop who places his job first, his individual selfhood last. He does not think much about being Jewish. When he gets in a fix with a black superior who calls him a kike, he's all set to come to blows, but we intuit that his resentment develops more out of departmental enmity than an individual feeling of offense. Throughout the movie, Mamet's characters exercise the most candid street language in their ethnic and licentious back-and-forth, as if somehow getting the spite open to the elements is a step forward.Gold's fuming about the doctor because the murder of the doctor's mother was the occasion of Gold being pulled off the big drug case. The mother, an obstinate old lady, ran a cornerstore in a black ghetto. She didn't need the money, but she declined to move, and she's shot dead in a robbery. Bobby, speeding toward the drug bust with his partner, comes across the scene of the crime by chance. "I'm not here. You didn't see me." But the old woman's son, who has sway downtown, wants him assigned to the case. Because Gold's Jewish, the doctor thinks, he'll truly be concerned. The doctor has the wrong man. What Mamet's having a go at here, I feel, is uniting the composition of a thriller with the gist of an identity transformation. The two cases get all mishmashed throughout, the black dealer on the run, the murdered old lady, and, from a theoretical angle, Bobby's not going to be able to solve who did anything until he solves who he is.Mamet owns the copyright on oblique, repetitive dialogue steeped in pathos, and this third directorial effort, a great example of a film whose bare-bones VHS and DVD releases go out of print and are salvaged by the relatively recent cinema aficionado DVD collective distributions, namely Criterion, hisses with liveliness and kick, and with offhand colloquial dialogue by Mamet, who takes down-to-earth dialectic design and abridges them into a form of hardened, straight-thinking verse. He's a filmmaker with a lucid awareness of how he wants to advance. He applies the rudiments of time-honored standards, the con game, the mistaken identity, the personal crisis, the cop picture, as scaffold for movies that ask questions like: Who's real? Who can you trust? What do people truly want? Here he has more than a few of his favorite actors, who've made their bones in Mamet stage productions: Mantegna, the now veteran Macy, Jack Wallace, the intriguing character actor/magician Ricky Jay.I must concede that once again with Mamet's work, I get the impression that the actors are so tied down to the stringent verbatim requirements of delivering his dialogue that they can't entirely let go, be spontaneous, but force a repetitious of something that must be just so. But nevertheless, they seem to genuinely listen to each other and respond, to have shaped around Mamet's steel architecture. After all, the emotional thread is there, and it's strong. A consistent yarn in Mamet's film work is his intellectual use of editing, combining one shot to the next to elicit a line of reasoning, so we make clear sense of the emotions extracted by his story. We feel it even before Gold, or we, realize his relationship to the significant situation, his stakes in it, his fears and desires, and most of all, his challenges. He and all his partners are guys with contour haircuts who smoke cigarettes like they require them, not a cast of weather-beaten teen coverboys. They're middle-aged, stressed and weary. And Mamet makes them clear from their present actions. We get the impression that Bobby Gold is not in harmony with his Jewish identity as, like many of his partners, he has let the job replace the person. Gold has become so case-hardened, he doesn't even know how he sounds, until he hears himself through that woman.Mamet's dialogue may be extremely mannered and lyrical, but it still serves the story the right way: It evokes, not decides, the reading of a scene, calls up the imagination to give a minimal context upon which the actor establishes character. Evocation, imagination, minimalism, character: Right up the alley of every good writer in every medium it concerns.

A very interesting mystery thriller which unfortunately completely falls apart in the last third.Mantegna, playing a Jew, behaves in an increasingly absurd, unconvincing, and baffling way in the last third; he suddenly becomes a proud Jew who wants to fight for "the cause" and even blows up a Nazi owner's store to make his older, new Jewish acquaintances accept him as a brothers-in-arms Jew. Then there is that scene with him and Rhames which just lacks realism. But the most disappointing thing about the movie is just how totally illogical the final twist is; the ending basically throws the entire movie's events upside-down on its head, and absolutely nothing adds up! Apparently he was set up by the secret Jewish organization in order to... what? It isn't clear at all.Let's start from the beginning: Mantegna totally coincidentally stumbles on a murder case with an old Jewish lady, and in no time is he re-assigned from an old case to that Jewish-murder case by powerful, rich New York Jews. He is then, as we find out at the end through that silly twist, lead on by the family of the dead Jewish lady to believe that someone is trying to kill them from a roof, where they evidently put a man to play a killer, and where they planted a piece of paper with a pseudo-name of Hitler's written on it, implying an anti-Semitic plot. Mantegna is then, once again, set up by the Jews - in a library - where he is fooled into discovering a secret Jewish military base in an old building. The old Jews tell him to give them a piece of paper; a list of names. After he says he can't because it's a piece of filed-away police evidence, they get all sulky and annoyed by his lack of "Jewishness". This gets Mantegna to feel so extremely guilty that he wants to make it up for them: he finds a Jewish woman he met previously and somehow knows before-hand that she is also involved. How the hell did he know that?! Absurd. Then she leads him on to blow up the Nazi owner's store, but it is he who volunteers to do it. How did "they" know he would volunteer? Shaky credibility there. And then the Jews blackmail him with photos of him blowing up the store if he doesn't give them that list.So what's the story here??!... The Jews set him up so that he would blow up the store? And why?: because that would force him to give them the list. There is only one problem with that: he wouldn't have had the list in the first place if the Jews hadn't given him the murder case! The movie makes no sense at all. It turns out that the murderers of the old lady were some black kids, and that Mantegna was set up. That's all we ever find out. What we don't ever find out is: 1) was there a Jewish terrorist group? 2) If they did exist then why frame Mantegna? 3) How would they possibly know how Mantegna would think, act, or react in a SERIES of different situations and discoveries during his research of the case? 4) Above all, how the hell did they know he would be a Jew who would develop extreme feelings of guilt in such a short period of time for "neglecting" his Jewishness? Mamet has totally screwed up with the logic this time. While the other two movies I saw were sometimes far-fetched, they never lacked logic and a credible conclusion. This time around, however, Mamet leaves so many loose ends that the viewer can only finish the movie feeling confused and somewhat disappointed.