Unheralded gem, no question.
I suspect variations of my own facetious description (Sonny Crockett vs. neo-Nazi's) were used by lazy critics to dismiss Dead Bang at the time of its release, coinciding as it did with the end of Miami Vice's 5 year run. His day job as the pastel-clad TV cop was fruitful and not without its rewards, but Don Johnson was no doubt looking to break out of the TV ghetto and establish himself as a leading-man movie star. He had made a few other stabs at it during Vice's run, mostly in adult drama fare, but Dead Bang seemed like Johnson really grasping for it, creating what he hoped to be a hard-nosed hero in an exciting action vehicle.
But, if you look at say, Lethal Weapon 2 or Tango & Cash from the same year, Dead Bang seems sober by comparison, procedural and gritty, not cartoonish or unabashedly escapist like the other studio cop films doing better business. It wasn't built around set pieces or stunts. It's a cop movie, a crime story, not an action movie, and it failed to do what Johnson must have hoped.
Jerry Beck is an LA homicide detective drinking his way through a personal crisis. His wife has left him, taking their two children with her, and the divorce is not only sapping his bank account, but the last ounces of his patience and dignity. Holed up in a squalid apartment, Jerry hits the bottle and let's his troubles stack up like the dirty dishes in his sink.
Sound familiar? That's because it is. Most, if not all, 80's cop movies featured a similar predicament for their heroes to stew in. But the stewing usually only lasted for about 10 minutes before the action started. It got to the point where whenever I came across the divorced-cop scenario, I'd roll my eyes and ask "isn't there any cops who can catch badguys AND make their marriage work?"
For me, these character sub-plots felt tacked-on and interchangeable, needless distractions from the action, especially since most of the films in question abandoned these family story threads until a token reconciliation just before the end credits. So I had the same reaction when Dead Bang started going through similar motions. Except the handling of this well-worn formula seemed a little more subtle, a little more realistic. And lo and behold, the troubles that dog Beck in the first 10 minutes of the movie, ride him all the way along. There is no reconciliation for Beck and his family simply because he solved a tough case or killed a bad man. We don't see it, but after the intensity of his hunt for justice is over, we know Jerry Beck goes back to his broken life with no more of a foothold on his problems than when he left.
When Beck catches the case of a murdered cop, its serves as a welcome distraction from the anger and loneliness of spending a Christmas away from his kids. And that seems to be Jerry's sole motivation for doggedly pursuing the killers across several states, at great peril to his life and his career: it's an escape from his problems. It's this commitment to character and the films willingness to show how a cops troubled home life might affect their job that kept me from rolling my eyes out of boredom, and in fact, kept me invested in both the man and his pursuit.
The cop killer turns out to be a white supremacist linked with extremist militias in the midwest, and as Beck relentlessly pursues them, becoming more and more convinced of a larger threat, we still get to see how raw he is and just how much he's slipped down the department ladder. When a lead in the case takes him far from home, to a frigid farming town, he can't even get a money transfer approved to pay for a motel or food and uses the last few bucks in his wallet to buy a coat from a second-hand store. That's some hardboiled shit right there!
The case leads Beck to a white supremacist militia fortress and a private army masquerading as a church. The white local sheriffs seem ambivalent to Beck's assertion that a major terrorist threat is being staged, and an FBI agent, played by an unusually neutered William Forsythe, is unwilling to step beyond his tepid protocol.
Beck seems to be an LA cop completely on his own in a dead-end town with an army hunting for his head. That is until he teams up with the only people he can trust when facing a white supremacist terrorist cell: black cops. Boom! How fucking cool is that? Beck joining forces with a squad of black cops ready to kick some KKK ass is a fucking badass moment for sure, and leads to the films final shootout.
Throughout Dead Bang, Johnson's work as Beck is flavored with just the right amount of irritation and fatigue, really selling his characters broke-down crisis. He is great in the role and seems to avoid action-hero trappings or movie star posturing. He doesn't play Beck as overly virtuous or a kind of super-cop, he just happens to be doing his job when everyone else seems content to sleepwalk through theirs.
When I first saw Dead Bang, I was 8 or 9 years old and aside from the semi-infamous puke-arrest scene (a hungover Johnson chases down a perp only to puke all over him as he cuffs him) it was too slow for me. With a name like Dead Bang (greatest movie title ever?), I went into it thinking it would have a lot more death and little more bang. Truthfully, at that age, Tango & Cash was more my speed. I'm really glad I caught up with it again though, as an adult (adult-ish?), because not only did I thoroughly enjoy this go-around, but I realized it's one of the best cop films of the 80's that unfortunately has been overlooked.
Good luck hunting it down though.
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