Hollywood Homicide

PREVIEW (posted 6/6/03)
This comedy from Ron Shelton (Dark Blue) stars Harrison Ford as a veteran LAPD detective and Josh Hartnett as his rookie partner. Together, they investigate the murder of a rap group.
The Bottom Line: The pairing of It Boy Hartnett and seasoned pro Ford could profitably pull in two audiences at the box office. (Sony)

Hot Ticket

“When I was doing Dark Blue,” Shelton says, “I thought, I’d like to do a good-cop movie too. But what’s the cop movie we haven’t seen?” Soon he discovered that many LAPD homicide detectives have second jobs on the side, “and I thought that was a rich idea.” So in this action comedy, veteran detective Joe Gavilan (Ford) is also a realtor. “He’s not too proud to use his badge occasionally to help him open an opportunity for real estate sales,” Ford says. And K.C. Calden (Hartnett), his rookie partner, doubles as a yoga instructor and an aspiring actor. “He’s obviously got a little bit of an identity crisis going on,” Hartnett says. With some help from Gavilan’s flame, a radio psychic played by Olin (who describes their relationship as “two grown-up people who have fun in a very disarming way”), the partners investigate the gangland-style murder of a rap group. Shelton (Bull Durham), who cowrote the film with a former LAPD cop, boasts that the film was shot “all on location in Hollywood. No, this is not Toronto!”

That was close: At one point during filming, Hartnett and Ford’s car accidentally hit a stunt car, resulting in minor injuries. “It wasn’t terrible,” Shelton says, “but it was the sort of thing where you saw that it could have been terrible.”