Fuzz

This is a movie with an unenviably bad reputation.  However, although it is many, many years since I've seen it, I've always thought that it wasn't that bad.  Sadly, as it seems to have vanished completely from public view, it is impossible for me to verify my assessment of twenty odd years ago (probably more, if I'm to be honest).  This trailer does little to dispel the bad rep the film still gets in some quarters (poor sound quality doesn't help, to be fair), giving the impression that it is little more than a typical early seventies Burt Reynolds vehicle.  Perhaps if the film had simply been that, then it might have been better received.  The problem is that Fuzz can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be and this indecision is reflected in the script, performances and direction.

On the one hand it seems to want to be a MASH-style satire of US policing, with the cops portrayed as institutionally inefficient and often incompetent, completely unable to deal with Yul Brynner's slick extortionist. On the other hand it also seems to want to be a gritty portrayal of the reality of big-city policing, (with sub-plots including a serial rapist and a series of arson attacks on sleeping vagrants).  Add to that a desire to be a 'zany' comedy in places and the requirement to function as a Burt Reynolds action film and the end result is uneven, to say the least. 

The film is even more problematic when viewed as a literary adaptation, being based, of course, on one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, (the adaptation is by Evan Hunter who was also Ed McBain and several other pseudonyms), which, whilst often mildly humourous and satirical, certainly weren't 'zany' comedies.  Moreover, they didn't portray the police as incompetent.   Quite the opposite.  The radical change of tone in the film adaptation means that most of the main characters don't really resemble their literary equivalents either physically, or in terms of personality.  I'm not sure any reader of the series would have envisaged the main detective character Steve Carella as looking like Burt Reynolds, for instance, (although, to be fair, physically, he isn't that bad casting, it's just the characterisation as a cigar-chomping moustacioed action man which is at odds with the printed page), whilst Jack Weston is a highly unlikely Detective Meyer Meyer.   Another oddity is the film's setting: Boston.  Whilst the books never specify the city they are set in, it is obviously a thinly fictionalised New York, with the organisation of its police force reflecting that of the NYPD.  Whilst the NYPD is organised into boroughs and numbered precincts, (although the NYPD doesn't have an 87th Precinct, if it existed, it would, under their numbering scheme, be in the Brooklyn North borough), the Boston PD is organised into districts with numbers like D-14 or B-2, yet the film version of Fuzz clearly identifies its setting as the '87th Precinct'.  Nitpicking, I know, but, for me, it highlights a fundamental problem with the adaptation - whilst the book series prides itself on an adherence to established police procedures, the film (scripted by the same author), plays fast and loose with such things.

When all's said and done, if you simply ignore the film's literary origins and accept it on its own merits as a black comedy parodying police procedurals, then it is, as I recall, pretty entertaining,  It's also an above average Burt Reynolds vehicle.