The life of Serpico, a young courageous and honest police officer, who does his best, in order to stay away from the criminals world that full of corruption and havoc, has been changed completely, when he mysteriously finds himself involved in that corrupted world, the thing that brings terrible for him and makes him struggle.
A virtuoso performance by Al Pacino and some expert location work by Sidney Lumet add up to a tour de force genre piece that transcends the supercop conventions to create a moving, engrossing portrait of Frank Serpico.
"Serpico" is a candid and gritty police expose film that juxtaposes systematic police graft with the personal toll it takes on the man who attempts to blow the lid on the crooked activities that surround him.
Imbued with mythic and even religious dimensions, Al Pacino's resourceful, Oscar-nominated performance takes Lumet's quinessential 1970s New York film beyond the realm of a cop-corruption drama.
A remarkable record of one man's rebellion against the sort of sleaziness and second-rateness that has affected so much American life, from the ingredients of its hamburgers to the ethics of its civil servants and politicians.
Combustible Celluloid
March 06, 2009
Lumet and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler can't do anything but skim rapidly over the surface of their tale.
... set the style of American crime dramas in the seventies with his gritty look at street-level law enforcement and realistic portrait of procedure and systemic failure and it established Lumet as a director of intelligent, gritty, modern crime dramas
Wonderful potential, and wasted. Serpico has some brutal surface flash and an acetylene performance by Al Pacino in the title role, but its energy is used to dodge all the questions it should have raised and answered.
