Q&A, an aggressively dark, virulently cheerless crooked cop opera from 1990, thankfully didn’t cap director Sidney Lumet’s career (over the next 17 years he piloted seven more projects, including unsung winners Find Me Guilty and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead) but it wrapped his ‘police corruption trilogy’, begun in the 70s with Serpico, mastered at the start of the 80s with Prince Of The City. Following 1982s The Verdict, he lost considerable steam (hey, with a fine track record, it’s allowed), not in guiding performances but in picking properties; this one, which he also wrote, is marked by some ace acting but is drearily paced, achingly familiar and so determinedly ugly and abrasive you feel like you’ve taken a 132-minute bath in a backed-up sewer. *

After NYPD lieutenant ‘Mike Brennan’ (Nick Nolte) shoots—as in assassinates—a local drug dealer, ‘Al Reilly’ (Tim Hutton) is assigned to ‘investigate’—as in ‘clear’—the occurrence. Raw, force-of-ill-nature Brennan, a legend in the department, is decorated, respected and feared.  Reilly, once a patrolman (family of cops), turned Deputy District Attorney, is callow but honest, and as the evidence accumulates and involved parties (an ethnic cross-section of hoods, junkies, policemen, lawyers and pols) circle wagons, truth and justice look to be twisted and ripped into shreds. Like we know from the first scene—because we’ve seen this before (often) and since (ditto). Staff with good actors. Locate seamy settings. Stuff script with enough elaborately-spouted profanity and racial and ethnic slurs to make a Klansman blush. Get mean. Stay there.

It’s too much—overkill on venom and ‘colorful’ cussing—and not enough—the care-factor is AWOL with the lineup of unsympathetic and/or repellent people and dispirited deja vu. The actors all go full throttle (cuz they’re working for Lumet) but his script is blunt and obvious, the murk and malevolence (pick a “negative word beginning with ‘m’; this screenplay is a textbook) belabored by a needless subplot. Compare it to Prince Of The City. That was also profane (with memorable quotable barbs) but it felt more authentic (this one has you thinking “people that swear this much don’t swear this much”), was longer by 35 minutes but felt shorter, was more complicated yet easier to follow and carried enough humanity in its complex characters so that it inspired a sense of tragedy instead of futility, redemption rather than revulsion.

A Golden Retriever surrounded by Rottweilers, Hutton’s wounded knight is fine, and the supporting cast deliver with commendable spunk, but the show belongs to Nolte and Armand Assante, who plays ‘Roberto “Bobby Tex” Texador’, a Puerto Rican drug dealer who’s been selected as fall guy for the crooked cops and sacrificial—lamb’s not the word, wolverine is more like it—token from the Mafia further up the feast chain. Beefed up by an extra 45 pounds to be extra-imposing, Nolte tears into the remorseless Brennan with brute ferocity, enough to make forthcoming corrupt cops look in the mirror to see if he’s behind them. Assante takes what could’ve been a temptation to ham on high and invests triangle-targeted Bobby Tex with bristling power, rough-hewn elegance, gamesman smarts and a touch of dignity. Those two powerhouse performances save the movie from itself. **

Critics clucked approval, but against a $6,000,000 tab the box office of $11,208,000 only registered #94 in ’90. Lumet fans (count us) will stick around thru the offal wade.

Swearing up a downtown shitstorm: Luis Guzmán, Charles S. Dutton, Lee Richardson, Jenny Lumet (the director’s daughter, in the needless subplot), Paul Calderon, Patrick O’Neal, Dominic Chianese, Leonardo Cimino, Fyvush Finkle, International Chrysis, John Capodice.

* Up from the streets—-Lumet’s script was adapted from a book written by Edwin Torres, a former New York State Supreme Court Judge who also wrote “Carlito’s Way”. Torres rose from the hard knocks of Spanish Harlem, so there’s undoubted veracity behind the characters and milieu, but Lumet’s translation is too often forced than forceful. Nolte and Assante salvage what remains of very bleak days.

** Nick’s kids, a sample lineup—Harvey Keitel (Bad Lieutenant), Richard Gere (Internal Affairs), Denzel Washington (Training Day), Woody Harrelson (Rampart), Ray Liotta (Unlawful Entry), Samuel L. Jackson (Lakeview Terrace).