Sadly Over-hyped

One of my all time favorites.

Best movie ever!

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This is a great movie. Tons of famous actors. Sly did a great job acting. One of his best jobs. Worth a watch.

Copland is very subtle in its character development and revelations. The characters are very real and complex. This film will not take you by the hand and show you around. You have to be astute and infer what is going down. The key to this movie is that the people are real. The acting is top notch. Besides all the familiar names doing an outstanding job, the entire cast of characters... and there are many.. all come off as very real, surprising the viewer as they are just as unpredictable as real people. That's why this movie is a masterpiece... it demands more than one viewing to fully appreciate the unfolding drama. Stallone's character, who never shakes off his naïveté and self doubt, emerges victorious in spite of himself. Kietel and his minions are vain, nasty creeps..like many people you may know. Liotta is a tortured soul who somehow has a shred of decency left. DeNirio's character lacks integrity and is in a position of authority; a man who lacks the courage to pursue the truth. All these people are real.

I'll be honest. Copland is not a great film. It's a better watch the second time around, where it entertained me much more. Stallone is in his element, and will surprise you, especially people doubting his acting ability, as a beaten cop, who got the bad end of the stick. He works in this town on the other side of the Jersey river, that offers a much more prosperous future. In his own town, he just discovers police corruption which runs a deep path, headed by old colleague (Keitel, in a tight performance). The police force here, is a front for drugs, and other things, where we meet a few bad apples like T2's Robert Patrick, an actor who always brings something to the table. A supposed jumper, cop Rappaport disappears, and later on, becomes a liability, where the only cop he can trust is overweight, apathetic Stallone, who's just so good in this film. Copland does have some original and fresh touches about it, regarding plot, one scene borrowing, or resembling that one in Striking Distance. De Niro as a tough, hard as nails IA detective, of course, does us solid. A beefy Liotta is also very good, as Stallone's good friend and partner, adding a kind of doubting menace regarding his standing as a honest cop, which I liked, as well as his excellent talent at demonstrating very real anger, but apart from Stallone, Keitel was the other one who really impressed me. There's nothing but good actors in Copland, Cathy Moriarty, worse praising too, as a Keitel's haggard wife, doing a younger cop. The movie does keep falling to patches of ordinary, as it's not the best pick off the shelf, but definitely watch this good acting over story, especially when the films heralded by Stallone's really impressive acting you gotta witness.

There's so much I want to hate and love about Cop Land equally that its the most deserving of a 5/10 score I've ever seen. To borrow from Rita Kempley's review, Cop Land is so full of characters and plots clamouring for the audience's attention that its director should have been traded for a traffic cop. Then we would have had a semblance of balance.Stallone is the half-deaf local sheriff of a small New Jersey town inhabited mostly by New York cops. One of the strongest attributes of the film is the subtle acting and natural interactions between the characters. All the cops talk to Freddie like he's a bum who they let pretend he's in charge so he can have a turn but no one actually respects. Stallone (40 pounds pudgier than usual) ambles around slowly, with no self-esteem and even less authority. It is an absolutely masterful performance by Stallone (his best when he's not playing Rocky Balboa). The one scene where he shouts and "acts" is actually weaker than the sweeter, quieter moments of him just going around being a sheriff. It speaks a great deal about the subtlety of acting.Harvey Keitel, on the other end of the spectrum, could be a man ten feet tall. His authority is unquestionable, his presence intimidating. Cop Land has got such an incredible cast on its hands that no one would even begin to know what to do with them all, and indeed James Mangold doesn't know what to do. Its almost as if characters were created because they needed to give these great actors something to do. The characters played by great actors Robert Patrick and John Spencer could have been combined into one alongside Arthur Nascarella's unmemorable character. Ray Liotta is such a strong performance that he tends to overshadow Stallone and crowd this ostensible main character out of his own movie. Liotta's character is never fully explained and becomes rather redundant. None of the acting in Cop Land is bad, however, and many of the actors manage to make a huge mark with their miniscule parts - most notably Paul Calderon and Janeane Garofalo. However, I did find Michael Rapaport's performance to be very annoying and below the quality worthy of this cast for such an important character.James Mangold's direction and script both feature some average choices. The subplot about Figgsy's house burning down provides little to the story and actually leaves a big gaping hole in Liotta's performance when he doesn't show any grief. Rappaport's character makes utterly stupid decisions like peeking out of the back of a car in plain view of people who think he's dead. The idea of a man everyone thinks is dead openly attending a giant party has the potential to be a subtle message on how corrupt the cops are and arrogant about getting away with it, but ends up being annoyingly naive on everyone's part. There's one inspired moment when Stallone tries to escort Superboy to the station (which Mangold would recreate even better in 3:10 to Yuma 10 years later) which is then ruined by the tensionless slow- motion action sequence that finishes the film. Throughout the film, Howard Shore's music is wonderful, especially his use of violins.Stallone deserves to be proud of the performance he gives, but with all the cast and talent assembled, Cop Land deserved to be great. What we get is okay.