If you gave Forrest Gump a badge and a gun and sent him after Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, you'd pretty much have the movie "Cop Land," which delivers a truckload of strong performances, but never quite falls together.
Sylvester Stallone plays against type as a beaten-down, half-deaf small town sheriff in Garrison, New Jersey, a neighborhood inhabited by a corrupt faction of the NYPD led by Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel).
"Cop Land" starts echoing "GoodFellas" from the opening voice-over by Robert DeNiro's honest but mean-spirited Internal Affairs officer Moe Tilden. DeNiro explains how the town elected local hero Freddy Heflin (Stallone) as their mayor. Years ago he had rescued Liz Randone (Annabella Sciorra) from drowning, but lost his hearing in one ear as a result.
A complicated web of corruption gets even more complicated when rookie cop Murray Babitch (Michael Rapaport) mistakenly shoots two black motorists on the George Washington Bridge.
When EMS technicians catch a dirty cop planting evidence, the situation gets sticky, and Donlan sets up an elaborate plan to fake Babitch's death until things blow over.
Tilden decides the time is right to break open Donlan's conspiracy. He travels to Garrison, where both Tilden and Donlan take advantage of Freddy's desire to be an NYPD cop as they try to get him to do their bidding.
Freddy tries to look for Babitch and finds his entire life is enmeshed in Donlan's web -- from the now-married Liz to his best buddy Gary Figgis (Ray Liotta). He is sheriff in a land of criminal police and broken promises.
Stallone and Liotta deliver the film's only stand-out performances. DeNiro, Keitel and Rapaport are good but way too familiar in these types of roles.
The rest of the cast is a veritable who's-who of character actors and indie film players, but most are wasted in flat supporting roles.
The film runs into trouble when it switches from Scorsese mode to "Sling Blade" mode as it focuses on the personal struggle of Stallone's Freddy.
It's not through any failings on Stallone's part, however. Moving back and forth between the two different styles proves awkward, and manhandled editing mars many of the important scenes for Freddy's character development.
Stallone manages to convey the suffering and inner decay of his character, especially in the film's opening scenes, but his eventual transformation into a gun-toting Boo Radley at the film's conclusion doesn't work because writer/director James Mangold cut away from too many of his emotional turning points.
There's also too much going on for one short movie to handle, and much of the plot's action is too convenient and contrived.
All of the film's plots and sub-plots get tied up in a simple resolution that doesn't offer anything but a tidy moral message.
But even though it doesn't quite hold together, "Cop Land" offers a lot of good film and some strong scenes -- Freddy sitting at home listening to his old mono Bruce Springsteen records, Liotta sticking a dart up the nose of a crooked cop or any Liotta scene, for that matter.
"Cop Land" could be a great crime drama or a strong character study, but as both, it's not 100 percent effective as either. Mangold's first film, "Heavy," was a melancholy portrait of four lives in a small town restaurant.
There are too many lives in "Cop Land," however, for the movie to competently portray all of them.
