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I love Al Pacino, he's a great actor and he filmed this movie right after the Godfather, and it was critically acclaimed at the time, and had a big impact overall, because it was the first movie of it's kind to target police corruptions, and it's based on a true story of Frank Serpico, a good cop trying to do his job in a world full of corruptions and bribes, trying his hardest to stay away from corruption but he starts finding that his friends don't trust him because he don't take bribes, he tries to go to big government officials to blow the whistle on his police department, but then find out that those people are corrupted too and have no intentions of making things better, so Serpico starts to get threats from other cops and starts to feel endangered, so he decide to go the New York times and blow the situation.
As you may notice, the story is really interesting, as it's guide you through 10 years of Al Pacino as a cop, transferring from a street cop to narcotics to BCI (Bureau of Criminal Identification), and while all this sounds really good, it actually wasn't, the movie had a very cheap production, the scenes looks awful, no lighting control, the sounds wasn't filtered, no camera angles, the car chases was bad, and most importantly, the movie had a terrible editing, i actually don't remember watching a movie where the editing annoyed me, the editor used so many jump-cuts, it was awkward, it felt like the scenes weren't complete, and someone have interrupted that scene to bring you another one, i mean seriously, even independent movies have better editing than this, also, there wasn't any sound mixing, they play a track at some scene and when it finished, they play another one, NOW, all this details above is just me being picky (as i always do) but here's the major downer with this movie, the performances were absolutely terrible, as i said before, i love Al Pacino, but the character he played here was really dull and emotionless, even if he was nominated for an academy award, even if he played that character exactly like the real frank Serpico, i feel like they should have made it more interesting, meaning, that if the real Frank Serpico was really dull, then they should make him interesting, this how motion pictures work, they take the life of an average Joe and make it appealing, and it wasn't just about the costumes and the beard and the dog and the rat that Frank had all the time, it should be more about the character, Al Pacino was calm the entire movie, making it very hard to understand his emotions and character development, and when he snapped, there wasn't a good performance form the other actor to make it a scene, Al Pacino was acting and then reacting to himself, and it wasn't really good.
Believe it or not, i was actually thinking about turning off the movie the entire time, because i had such a bad time, and the movie is really really long, and had so many short scenes that had absolutely nothing to do with the overall story, it was a good story done bad, and that's really sad because it had potential but potential by itself is nothing if it followed by a terrible execution.
5/10
