The Glass Shield

Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiight have seen this a little too close to Serpico. LoriPettico is solid, but just like this rum and diet, it could've used more Ice Cube.

Some of the supporting performances are poorer, and exchanges more stilted, than anything in the bigger, dumber cop movies of the era, but the good bits are composed, played, and resonate like nothing else. It's also almost as likely as not that the rough spots, like the over-promoting of Ice Cube (who is good but only has like 10 minutes of screentime) were the result of Weinstein's bullying (or no-reshoot retaliation for Burnett refusing to be bullied into more Cube). Lori Petty is great.

In terms of ideas, seems ahead of its time with its emphasis on systemic injustice, particularly when you compare it to something like Lee's Blackkklansman, which just came out at the time of this viewing. That said, the film suffers a bit from a stilted-ness, and generic villains. The central relationship between black cop and female cop is a solid base from which to explore these ideas.

Has backbone behind its sentiments, even if many viewers will write off a worn-out platitudinous message. But I see it as a pre-9/11 pre-cursor to The Wire. The buddy cop bickering and camaraderie between a black man and a Jewish woman as disenfranchised pariahs is appreciated, but more at the heart of it, Burnett carves out an unsettling plot that delineates broad institutionalized hatred to set up an angry portrait of a white male-dominated iron rule and discriminatory enmity amongst police.

I expected this to be terrible, but it is actually average. So uh... that's something it's got going for it.