Ben says: Although I haven't seen it, Lee Tamahori's Once were Warriors is supposed to be a very good film which makes this all the more disappointing. As Fi says, the film is based around four LA cops who were a squad of officers that operated outside normal departmental jurisdiction, in order to get their job done by any means necessary. This film should have stayed an ensemble piece rather than drifting off into an implausible detective story with Chazz Palminteri along for comic relief, especially since Michael Madesn and Chris Penn are just too good to waste as hard guys. Also, it may just have been the screen we saw the film in but the soundtrack sounded like is was recorded by crickets and there was a lot of extraneous noise. Something that I had never noticed before was also brought to my attention by this movie - namely that Jennifer Connelly has the most enormous boobs. I'm a great fan of the Touchstone film The Rocketeer, and I nevered noticed how big they were in that, but here they were unmissable.This, however, did not make up for the film's poor editing, lack of character development and substandard story (I do have my standards you know). Another disappointment from Hollywood where studios seem to get handed great stories on a platter and then proceed to ruin them.
Ben gives it: 
Fiona says: The basic premise of this film is that there are four LA policemen working together in the late forties/early fifties trying to rid the town of gangsters and the mob. These four men, we are led to believe, will do anything to get their man and the first ten minutes of the film bears this out. Unfortunately, after this, the film focusses predominantly on Nick Nolte's character with a slightly lighter note to the story provided by Chazz Palminteri and his visits to the shrink.
The title of the film refers to a specific hill somewhere in LA where these four policemen mete out their justice. It seems, however, that the director felt it unecessary to pursue this thread of the story and chose instead to focus on someone's infidelity and the mystery surrounding the death of a young girl. From this point on, I felt that the story became very contrived and that suddenly the production people realised that they had to try to bring all the loose ends of the story back together. This resulted in a relatively slow amble through an hour and a half of film and then a mad scramble through the last ten minutes. Had the story focussed on the relationships between the four policemen and the work they had been put together to carry out, the film would have been much stronger. As it was, the characters played by Chris Penn and Michael Madsen disappeared from the story about half an hour in and only reappeared at the very end. I think it's a shame that the director took what was basically a very good story and turned it into a very mediocre film.
Fiona gives it:
last updated: 12th September 1996
