Stage

...We lose track of how close Riley is getting to the truth because Lumet constantly hops from the assistant D.A.'s investigation to Brennan's (the rogue cop is tracking down witnesses so he can snuff them) to that of a gangster played by Arman Assante, who is conducting his own to protect himself from Brennan...

...The good-cop-gone-wrong theme comes to nothing because no traces of Brennan's former virtues remain in the character we see on screen...

...Pressure is quickly put on the decent but ambitious greenhorn to clear the investigated detective, Brennan (Nick Nolte), who as the audience already knows, did not act in self-defense but murdered...

...And always threatening to come into play is the unwritten code of silence that keeps cops from blowing the whistle on errant cops...

...Nick Nolte, slinging his currently huge gut forward and sometimes sideways, has an histrionic wallow playing Brennan as a sort of urban Long John Silver...

...When Assante gets dispatched quite a few minutes before its conclusion, Q&A, in effect, ended for me...

...Toward the end of Q&A, we are suddenly given lumps of information about who did what to whom and for what reason, but these explanations don't really compensate for the alienating confusion of the bulk of the movie...

...Everybody investigators, suspects, witnesses, informants is chasing clues, beating up stool pigeons, snarling threats, cutting deals, offering protection, hiring assassins, outwitting assassins, assassinating assassins, calling in old debts, and generally being busy, busy, busy...

...Did Lumet discover in the cutting room how incoherent his storytelling was and then try to reshape the final scenes so as to include as much explanation as possible...

...In his dialogue, Lumet rings so many variations on the theme of bigotry that we come to perceive this problem as the central concern of the movie...

...But an enjoyable monster is not the same thing as a fallen hero, and it's the latter that I think Lumet had in mind...

...since we last saw him...

...It also becomes clear that each man in the room (the group includes those of Irish, Puerto Rican, and African descent) harbors racist notions and resentments, though Riley is one who has struggled to overcome his...

...But it seems to me that since Riley is by now in possession of the facts concerning some noisome police scandals, all he has to do is collaborate with Pete Hamill or Joseph Wambaugh on a best-selling expose and his mother would be on easy street for the rest of her life...

...The first thiry minutes or so are exciting precisely because the turbulent subject matter appears to be under tight directorial control...

...RICHARD ALLEVARICHARD ALLEVA...

...Indeed, Brennan saved the Me of one of his interrogators during a Shootout when "he took a bullet in his hand and threw it back...

...Remember," his superior tells him, "the Q&A defines all that happened...

...Fine, we tell ourselves, this movie is going to have focus...

...But, after barely twenty-five minutes of fairly tense confrontations, the characters are out of the interrogation room and roaming all over the city, and after a while they're even out of the city and down in San Juan...

...Bullock-strong Charles Dutton and ferret-swift Luis Guzman entertain as Hutton's sidekicks...

...But the reasons given for each investigator's silence are lame, and the weakest one of all is Riley's: his dead policeman father was involved with Brennan in some minor bribe taking and the revelation of this would lose Riley's mother her widow's pension...

...The movie is so stuffed with plot twists, unwieldy exposition, hasty explanations, and both necessary and unnecessary displays of violence that it bursts its dramatic seams...

...His skill with actors remains...

...An alertly prowling camera in a roomful of talented actors can result in dynamite cinema...

...For proof, just recall two other Sidney Lumet movies, Twelve Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express...

...But though the examples multiply, they remain isolated specimens instead of forming a pattern of evil that would help unify the movie...

...Best of all is elegant and menacing Armand Assante who plays his gangster as a self-styled Borgia of sleaze...

...If it's not in the Q&A, it didn't happen...

...When a Puerto Rican tough is killed by a plainclothes cop, young Assistant D. A. Riley (Timothy Hutton) is put in charge of the "Q&A" (question-and-answer investigation) of the case...

...Lee Richardson, as a sly, compassionate cog in the legal machinery, can render thinking visible on screen...

...Lumet tries to fulfill the theme of police corruption by showing Riley and his assistants finally failing to go public with their evidence when the D.A.'s office tries to hush up the Brennan affair...

...And since "the Q&A defines all that happens," what transpires in the interrogation room will define the drama...

...But, since Lumet never bothers to reorient us to the character at hand, we come to regard everyone with the dazed wonder of a tourist observing tribesmen whose customs are totally strange and whose actions seem without sequence...

...On the other hand, loyalty to their badges, plus the necessities of day-to-day law enforcement, can make these men put the lid on their bigotry...

...Watching this film is like listening to an insanely inept raconteur constantly interrupting himself with remarks such as: "Oh, yeah, let me put off telling you about the blowout that killed five people in the car and deprived Cousin June of her right eye until I explain why tires made in Brazil only blow out in cold weather and not in...

...The investigators all know and respect Brennan, the proverbial tough-but-fair cop who gets the job done ever if a few rules get chipped...

...It's an odd study of moral corruption that makes you regret only the death of a cocaine merchant...

...Excited by the potential richness of these matters and by Lumet's dependable skill with actors, I couldn't wait for Hutton, Nolte, and the other actors to go deeper into the investigation and really start locking horns...

...Despite administrative coercion and against the grain of his own ambition, our protagonist will struggle toward the truth through a series of confrontations between himself (backed by two police aides) and all those involved in the crime...

...As Q&A's action scatters, its themes get deflated...

...Each time the script shifts focus, we have to adjust to the fact that the pursuer we are now watching has picked up new evidence while he was offscreen and is therefore more enlightened or more confused (or both...

...Along with Nolte's enjoyable hamming, we get a cleanly etched portrait from Hutton that indicates he's no longer vying with Anthony Perkins to be the Prince of Nervous Tics...

...Lumet tries hard to be the cynical tough guy in his work, but maybe he's not cynical enough...

...We can't measure a fall unless we see the pedestal from which the figure toppled...

...So we have the theme of the fallen hero, and the question of how much pitch a raffish cop can touch before his moral nature darkens forever and rough tactics come to include murder...

...And our interest mounts in Q&A as the interrogation gets under way and the film's main themes are sounded...

...When the motive for Brennan's crime is uncovered in Q&A, it turns out to have nothing to do with racism...

...yet under that lid bigotry quietly boils, subtly and sometimes not so subtly influencing the course of the investigation...

...BAD COP LUMET'S 'O & A' usually rejoice when a moviemaker strives for dramatic fullness, but Sidney Lumet's Q&A is downright congested...

...Compare Q&A to Chinatown where the motif of rape (of land and of women) is repeatedly sounded precisely because rape turns out to be at the heart of Chinatown's mystery...