With Gangster Squad on release this week, I thought I’d take a look at Mulholland Falls, another tough neo-noir set in the post war city of angels. It features a similar team of two-fisted detectives who work off the books, loosely based on the Gangster Squad’s real life Robbery Division contemporaries, the Hat Squad. However, based on the flabby story telling and out of shape cast, a more fitting title might be “Ginster Squad”.

Mulholland Falls was director Lee Tamahori’s first American mainstream film after his critically lauded Once Were Warriors, about a troubled urban Maori family in his native New Zealand. Falls (1996) precedes the brilliant L.A Confidential by a year, yet comes across as a poor copycat. If…

Lee Tamahori pierde una oportunidad de oro al no hacer una obra maestra con todo lo que tenia a mano a la hora de hacer esta pelicula. Podia haber subido a los altares del cine, pero cuando no hay talento... (su posterior filmografia lo demuestra).

Un impactante comienzo. La famosa "Brigada del Sombreso", un grupo de cuatro policias de Los Angeles, entra en un restaurente infectado de mafiosos para llevarse al pez gordo. Lo suben en su auto y lo tiran por el famoso despeñadero de Mulholland. Aqui la historia promete y te pones alerta, esto puede ser bueno... podria haber sido bueno.

Un reparto impresionante con Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen y Chris Penn formando la Brigada del…

Two white males feel justified in their abuse of humanity. And not in a good way.

Holy moly this is a truly dull piece of 90s noir. Tamahori's uninspired direction is a waste of such a great cast and sets the stage for a post Once Were Warriors career filled with dross. It's almost as if he only watched Chinatown as research and then made a real hash at copying it, stylistically. The lame, flat, heavy-handed script didn't help matters either. Whole boring scenes were written to provide a clue that could have been given in a matter of seconds and the cops are either intentionally dumb or the script was written in such a way as to make the…

With Gangster Squad on release this week, I thought I’d take a look at Mulholland Falls, another tough neo-noir set in the post war city of angels. It features a similar team of two-fisted detectives who work off the books, loosely based on the Gangster Squad’s real life Robbery Division contemporaries, the Hat Squad. However, based on the flabby story telling and out of shape cast, a more fitting title might be “Ginster Squad”.

Mulholland Falls was director Lee Tamahori’s first American mainstream film after his critically lauded Once Were Warriors, about a troubled urban Maori family in his native New Zealand. Falls (1996) precedes the brilliant L.A Confidential by a year, yet comes across as a poor copycat. If…

Plot: In 1950's Los Angeles, a special crime squad of the LAPD investigates the murder of a young woman.

I went ahead and watched this movie due to the fact that it is inspired by the same true story that the new movie Gangster Squad is also inspired by. I was only a kid when it came out, but I was still surprised that I had never heard of it before. Nick Nolte still had a name at the time, but you could see that his star was definitely falling.

The first thing I noticed about this movie is that it is very dated. Sure it is a period piece, but I mean that it is dated when it comes…