I don't know how you can say a movie is anti-cop when the police are largely absent from the movie. The police as an institution is not a character in the film. The only cops we see do anything are Peterson and Pankow's characters, and Peterson's character states from the beginning that he's decided to forgo all legality in pursuit of vengeance. Your argument involves abstracting these two characters to a level they can't support. And your statement that "the systems at play will continue to churn out these figures because the systems are on fire" is baffling to me because we're never offered a system-wide view of anything. It's a small story focused on just a couple characters, most of whom don't interact with any larger system beyond a few nominal scenes.therewillbeblus wrote: Sat Apr 25, 2026 5:02 pmI agree with most of this, and yes, I think if by the end of the film you don't view this as anti=cop, we're just seeing different movies. Hackman's accidental kill at the end of The French Connection is in service of both obsessive, personal stakes and justice. It's complicated. What's nuanced about the ending of To Live and Die in L.A. is in how a "good" cop can turn bad and so easily slip into, not just 'a' role, but the exact same role as his predecessor, based on his work experience leading to desensitization. The systems at play will continue to churn out these figures because the systems are on fire, and there are no structural supports to produce a path forward for this cop to rehabilitate or disengage from the system, despite him having such traumatic experiences. It's much more dismal, and bathetic in a different way than The French Connection.ballmouse wrote: Fri Apr 24, 2026 7:54 pm If Chance has been portrayed as a hero, he's just one of another in a long line of antiheroes that pop culture has mythologized into heroes (see those early gangster films of the 30s to numerous cowboy roles in westerns to James Bond to any number of reckless cops in the 70s, etc.).
I don't think anyone who can separate someone's actions and decision making with charisma and screen presence is supposed to see Chance as a model cop or human being.
The film is by no means 'high cinema'. But it does a decent job of blending action and some artsy sensibility into a sort of 'revisionist police procedural' where, unlike a typical rouge cop film (like Dirty Harry), the protagonist seems to move the investigation forward by pure stupid chance rather than skilled police work and the alleged villain appears to be less of a criminal than the police investigating him.
Maybe to some extent Chance is a hero because for the audience, it's a chance to live vicariously through a character who acts purely on emotion, instinct, and a devil-may-care attitude rather than methodical procedure. But I (and maybe Friedkin as well) assumed any such notion would be extinguished by the end of the film.
For a systemic critique to work, you need a sense of a system working as normal, and we don't get that. We have a rogue cop from jump. So he can't stand in more largely for any system. I think there is a potential implied critique in how a rogue cop is allowed to act this way with little oversight, but you need to infer that from context since, again, the workings of the system are mostly absent. Maybe the best critique is how Peterson exploits his CI, although it's difficult to expand this into a systemic critique because its terms and history are only outlined in a few cursory lines of dialogue, and Peterson is already a cop on the edge, so he can be dismissed as an exception if you really wanted to. As for Pankow's transformation into Peterson at the end, this is a great portrait of human weakness, but it cannot be systemic since his corruption occurred outside the normal workings of the system (unless you're willing to believe that stuff like robbing people at gunpoint is routine behaviour in police departments). You can infer that Pankow's character is an example of how good cops could become bad cops through peer pressure, but this stops short of a systemic critique only because, again, it happens in an exaggerated scenario that's mostly outside the actual system, not through the regular every day choices you would expect an average police officer to encounter.
American action movies from Dirty Harry to Death Wish to Cobra to Lethal Weapon to even Robocop share a fascination with marginal figures at odds with the systems they're adjacent to. Chase in To Live and Die in L.A. is the same kind a marginal figure. Marginal figures can be used to indict a system by possessing a morality superior to it (Dirty Harry) or by being victimized by it (Robocop), but in all cases the critique comes through contrast. As a marginal figure, Chase cannot be taken as a symbol of the system more widely. And given that he sucks so hard, he can't reduce the system through contrast, except by the fact that he exists at all I guess.
Your post is actually an amazing description of Ringo Lam's City on Fire, a movie whose systemic critique is so searing because it shows its systems as encompassing and inescapable. All the ugly, corrupting actions occur within the normal workings of a given system, not from rogue adrenaline junkies. And the movie does genuinely come across as anti-cop: by the end, the undercover detective is at more risk from his fellow police officers than from the gang of crooks he infiltrates, to the point that you as an audience member slowly feel your allegiance shifting to the gang members. To Live and Die in L.A. doesn't attempt anything like this. Its characters are not caught in systems, they're at the margins of them, by their own declaration. I just feel like a lot of the arguments in this thread are trying to make the film into something it's not. The movie often has a poor opinion of its two main police characters, but isn't so concerned with the police in general.
