To Live and Die In L.A. <\/em>was designed as a return to the director\u2019s glory days of The French Connection<\/em><\/a>: a hard-hitting police procedural with abrasive, workaday cops pitted against a sophisticated, elusive villain and a barn-burner of a mid-movie car chase. (The film\u2019s poster even read: \u201cThe director of The French Connection<\/em> is back on the street again.\u201d) For additional insurance, the film was lacquered with a sleek, MTV aesthetic modeled after the smash hit TV show Miami Vice<\/em><\/a>, with a pulsating synth soundtrack by chart-toppers Wang Chung. The stage was set for everybody to have fun tonight. But the thing about William Friedkin was that he could never stop being William Friedkin, and in trying to top The French Connection<\/em> he made a movie even more morally murky and unpleasant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However hard To Live and Die in L.A.<\/em> tries to look and sound like another gleaming, shitty \u201880s movie, it\u2019s got the rotting, miserable soul of a 1970s masterpiece. Friedkin tries to play along with popular genre tropes but he knows all too well that rebellious mavericks who live on the edge and play by their own rules only end up getting themselves and other innocent people killed. Our cocksure, swaggering anti-hero, Secret Service agent Richard Chance \u2013 named after John Wayne in Rio Bravo<\/em> \u2013 is played by William Petersen as a tornado of dickhead machismo. Fresh from Chicago\u2019s intensely physical Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Petersen can\u2019t sit down in a chair without spinning it around and straddling it. He\u2019s always standing with his legs planted far apart, as if his balls were too big to bring them any closer. He\u2019s amazing. He\u2019s unbearable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chance is obsessed with taking down Rick Masters, an effete counterfeiting legend played by Willem Dafoe, straight from Streets of Fire<\/em> and having a field day with Freidkin\u2019s penchant for sexual ambiguity. (In an early scene, Masters\u2019 girlfriend enters the room obviously played by a man in drag. Dafoe locks lips with her and a cut to the reverse angle finds him kissing actress Debra Feuer in the same costume. Just a little subliminal, Cruising<\/em>-esque goose to keep the audience on the back foot.) Masters killed Chance\u2019s partner \u2013 three days before his retirement, we\u2019re embracing every clich\u00e9 in the book here \u2013 and an idealistic rookie agent (John Pankow) gets caught up in the rogue cop\u2019s quest for revenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason Masters has gone untouched for so long is that he demands too much money up front from his customers. No law enforcement department would ever approve the outlandish sum required for a hand-to-hand buy, so Chance decides they should just go steal it from another bad guy. This plan is even stupider than it sounds, working entirely from suspicious sounding information Chance gets from a female informant he sexually exploits. She\u2019s played by Darlanne Fluegel, a leggy blonde who showed up in a lot of \u201880s genre movies and had the saddest eyes I\u2019d ever seen as a kid. She looked like a beautiful, broken doll. It goes without saying that Chance doesn\u2019t notice her haunted stare. He probably thinks she enjoys sleeping with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the pitiless pleasures of To Live and Die In L.A. <\/em>is an illicit thrill in Friedkin\u2019s dispassionate regard for the myriad stupid fuckups committed by pretty much everyone in the picture wearing a badge. While other \u201880s action movies lionized our boys in blue, here they\u2019re bumbling, violent jerkoffs, falling asleep during stakeouts and accidently shooting fellow officers in the back. I\u2019m hard-pressed to think of one thing that the \u201cgood guys\u201d do right in this film, while Dafoe\u2019s grinning, devilish mastermind (dig that last name again) has always got their number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a bruiser of a movie, with a nerve-shredding car chase headed the wrong way down the L.A. freeway that very possibly surpasses Fredkin\u2019s legendary French Connection<\/em> pursuit. One of my favorite touches is the absence of any traditional comic banter between the cops during the chase. Instead, Pankow just flails around the backseat, moaning in abject terror. The future sitcom staple\u2019s laughable unsuitability as an action hero is used very smartly here by Friedkin. Other canny casting choices include an early incarnation of John Turturro\u2019s \u201880s weasel persona, a suave Dean Stockwell as an insinuating defense attorney, and filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. as Chance\u2019s wryly exasperated boss. (Yes, that\u2019s Fraiser<\/em>\u2019s Jane Leeves as Dafoe\u2019s girlfriend\u2019s girlfriend, in another of the film\u2019s leering, peek-a-boo titillations from a time when bisexuality was considered tres outr\u00e9.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n To Live and Die in L.A.<\/em> was shot by the great German cinematographer Robby M\u00fcller, between his similarly down-market visions of Los Angeles in Repo Man<\/em><\/a> and Barfly<\/em>. The movie\u2019s slick, music video affectations can\u2019t conceal the scuzziness of these locations, set far from the Hollywood sign amid refineries, overpasses and vacant industrial spaces. All the sunsets and neon feel like a battered woman\u2019s smudged makeup over a black eye, while the cold, synthetic thrums of Wang Chung\u2019s score are missing the warm, soaring saxophones that ruled cop movie music of the era. Friedkin\u2019s film has aged so much better than other \u201880s policers because it captures the hard, amoral emptiness of the age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s something that happens near the end if this film that I wouldn\u2019t dream of giving away, maybe the most audacious \u201cdid they really just fucking do that?\u201d plot turn of any movie released that decade. But what sticks with me most is what comes after the story has come to a close. Friedkin favored final scenes that were haunting and unresolved, reminding us that the characters have been stained in their souls by these experiences, as have we by witnessing them. By the end of To Live and Die in L.A.<\/em>, Chance\u2019s toxicity is practically a contagion. We shiver at the words, \u201cYou\u2019re working for me now.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n “To Live and Die in L.A.” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/to-live-and-die-still1-1024x576.jpg\")
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