Rampart, review - Telegraph Dir: Oren Moverman; starring: Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster, Anne Heche Woody Harrelson is as corrosive as a faceful of battery acid in Rampart, an exhaustingly downbeat thriller about a bad cop slithering towards moral oblivion. Set during the Rampart scandal of the late 1990s, in which more than 70 Los Angeles Police officers were implicated in a Byzantine network of corruption, Oren Moverman's hard-bitten procedural tracks the decline of officer "Date Rape" Dave Brown (Harrelson), who's suspended from duty after being filmed beating an unarmed Mexican suspect. Moverman, Harrelson and the crime novelist James Ellroy, who co‑wrote Rampart's script, have created a character that in another film might have been magnetically watchable. Brown engineers confrontations with hoodlums in order to dish out a form of "street justice" that requires rather more use of his gun than his badge. He lives with both of his ex-wives (Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon), who happen to be sisters, and he detests every last thread of humanity in his city's colourful tapestry. "I'm not racist," he shrugs, "I hate everyone equally." But there's a jarring disconnect between Rampart's gleefully lurid depiction of sun-baked, neon-speckled 1990s LA and its flatly condemnatory attitude towards the man at its centre. Rampart bridges this gap only once, in an extraordinary scene in which Brown, acting on a tip-off, attempts to rob a high-stakes poker game to cover his mounting legal bills. When two armed gunmen arrive on the scene unexpectedly, the bust becomes a bloodbath that unfolds in a state of almost ecstatic moral chaos, which briefly gives the film the nerve‑rattling volatility that powered Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. But, unfortunately, Brown's collapse is otherwise a bit dull, and it's capped by an embarrassingly blunt sequence in which he visits a sex club, which allows Moverman to tick off a comprehensive list of descent-into-metaphorical-hell clichés. While it might have worked in another Ellroy film, for the director of The Messenger, his previous and unflinchingly serious collaboration with Harrelson, it feels cheap. As things getting steadily, inexorably worse, it's hard to know what we're supposed to extract, other than a vague sense that people who are inured to their own moral turpitude tend to come unstuck. Rampart might be a worthy attempt to probe the banality of evil, but after an hour and a half of its near-unvarying gruesomeness, it's the film that starts to feel decidedly banal.