Cruising | 1980

The brief: Steve Burns (Al Pacino) - a NY cop - is asked by his superior (Paul Sorvino) to pose as a gay man and go undercover at leather/S&M bars because he resembles the victims of a serial killer preying on members of the homosexual community. 

The writeup: The only reason I watched Cruising was because I had read James Franco is making a film based on the apparent "lost 40 minutes" and wanted to prepare myself for that. This was all right, but repetitive in parts (man goes into gay bar, leaves with another man, gets murdered) and it also suffered from severe plot holes. The closest we come to a motive for the murders, for instance, is the suggestion of a screwed up relationship between the killer and his father. The father tells his murderous son "you know what you have to do", and the psychopath is revealed to have penchant for uttering the immortal line "you made me do this" to all his victims. While it is never revealed explicitly, we’re left to assume our killer is committing his crimes as a way of repenting for his own acts of homosexuality - turning the film into something of a morality tales for the gays of '80s New York. Go careful, homos, else this will happen to you.

It's a brave and bold performance by Pacino, though. And you have to give him kudos for taking on such a role during a time of considerably more blighted gay rights. He must've known, for instance, that the film (graphic in both its sexual and homicidal aspects) would've caused controversy. There are also times when the film expresses real depth. As Burns befriends members of the gay community and pushes the boundaries of how far he is willing to go to discover the killer's identity, questions about his own sexuality bubble to the surface; his relationship with his girlfriend is pushed to its limit and his bosses begin to suspect his motives, and we’re offered insight into a potentially thrilling character development. 

Unfortunately, this is never truly explored in the short 98 minutes of the film, and all that is really to be taken away is a so-so cop drama without a heart. There’s too much left unexplained – including a frankly bizarre sequence in which a bearish black man in a nappy walks in and sucker-punches both Burns and the killer during an interrogation scene – and an suspiciously ambiguous ending which posits that the killers hasn’t really been captured at all… Perhaps Franco’s Interior. Leather Bar. will answer some of these unsolved questions, but mostly Cruising left me more disappointed than excited about this new film.