Hollywood Homicide

Marketed as a no-nonsense thriller, but obviously a comedy, Hollywood Homicide has the impact of a TV movie of the week: It neither packs a punch nor belongs in the same league as many of the other summer films vying for the top spot at the box office. Even when you get beyond the extraneous subplots, stilted direction, and exposition that would make Syd Field blush, what you're left with is nothing more than a routine buddy cop film that brings little to the genre—though it does seem to try very hard.
The best that can be said for writer-director Ron Shelton (Dark Blue, Tin Cup) is that he succeeds in creating two well-illustrated leads, filling them with enough quirks to rise above the mismatched-police-duo cliche. Here, the partners are Detective Joe Galivan (Ford) and K.C. Calden (Hartnett), who find themselves investigating the onstage slaying of a rap group. Unfortunately, they are the only bright spots on an otherwise messy palette. The plot takes a backseat to the leads’ crazy antics (Ford’s character moonlights as a real estate agent, Hartnett teaches yoga and aspires to act), and the locations seem to have been chosen from postcards available at any souvenir shop on Sunset Blvd.  Even worse, the dialogue often painfully spells out the action for the audience, making it obvious that Shelton needed to get to the next plot point, fast.
The movie is a mess, but Harnett and Ford are likable enough to make Hollywood Homicide a unique addition to the cookie-cutter spectacles that usually grace theaters during the summer months. It is also refreshing to see Ford, who hasn’t had a decent role in recent years, attempt to branch out, testing his comedic skills and playing a character who is more loser than Indiana Jones hero. Ford provides the majority of the sparse laughs in Hollywood Homicide; the rest of the film seems to induce head-scratching from the audience.
In the end, while the film isn’t a complete failure, it’s not big-screen material, either. It seems that Hollywood Homicide would find a fitting home at Hollywood Video.  
—Addison MacDonald