Delayed Reaction: Serpico

Premise: A New York City officer goes undercover to expose corruption in the police department.

I was going to start this off by saying that I haven't seen that many Al Pacino movies. Then I looked at the list and realized that's a big lie. I've seen a bunch of Al Pacino movies. Other than The Godfather movies though, I haven't seen much young Al Pacino. By the time I really check in with him, it's when he's starting to lose it in Scarface or had given into hamming it up in Scent of a Woman. I think of performances like Glengarry Glen Ross or Heat as surprises, not the expectation. What I'm missing is more of the Pacino of Dog Day Afternoon, The Panic in Needle Park, or Serpico. I look at The Godfather as its own thing. While Pacino is great in it, he's giving a Coppola performance, not a Pacino performance. Serpico is a Pacino performance. I'm not even sure that I liked the movie that much, but Pacino sure is mesmerizing. There's that charisma I'm always hearing about. He's playing big, but not for the audience. This movie did more than anything I've seen to explain why people used to be so excited about him; why he was a go-to name when people listed great actors.

The movie itself is fine, I guess. Certain things haven't aged that well. This isn't the best moment for me to catch anything with police brutality. It was easy for me to lose track of the exact mechanics of Serpico's investigation. I fully didn't realize 12 years passed in the movie. That probably would've helped to realize a little earlier.

Side Thought: I tend to forget how dirty New York was. I mean, it still is in a lot of ways, but 1970s New York was a special kind of dirty. Even new things somehow looked run down. I could barely live in this movie for 2 hours. I'm not sure how people lived there for real. Granted, this isn't trying to paint a picture of the pretty New York.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend