Review of Rush (1999) by Inspecter B — 06 Feb 2008

Rush.

Starring:

Jason Patric.

Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Wow... If anybody never understood why Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" suddenly became a #1 hit (and brought "Slow Hand's" career back from the grave) then you, like myself until now, never saw Rush.

There were a hundred thousand different reasons why I didn't see Rush. First of all, besides the Academy Awards that year... Nobody ever talks about it. Now that's probably because people were on so many drugs during the eighties that they felt praising a movie about drugs would be incriminating themselves.

For this reason I thought the whole movie was nothing BUT these two characters lying on the floor getting high until they both died.

That wasn't it at all.

Rush is the story of an undercover narcotics officer (Jason Patric) who's forced by his boss Dodd (you saw him in The Big Lebowski... now see him again: The Stranger... Sam Elliott) to find a new partner. He finds Jennifer Jason Leigh. A rookie, completely new to the force, who agrees to join Patric (for reasons which escape me) in the extremely shady world of undercover police narcotics.

The chief of police is after a pimp, loanshark, and porn house owner by the name of Bill Gaines. Chief's hoping that nailing Gaines with a narcotics rap will send him into the mayor's chair. So he wants evidence against him at all cost.

This becomes problematic as Patric and Leigh are forced to, not only interact with, but live through the drug world waiting on their chance to nail Gaines.

The film has a rugged intensity that I have not seen matched in any of the similar films that followed it. (To me there was always something "plastic" about Arronovsky's "Requiem for a Dream.") You simply won't find a more intense representation of Nietcshe's classic idea: "He who hunts montsters should be careful he does not become one.".

And the lines between wrong and right are blurred so expertly that Leigh need not have mentioned "There's no difference.".

I only see the flaws in whatever I see and hear, but every single actor's performance here... down to the extras in the courtroom... were flawless.

A must see.