VividSimon Simply Perfect

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

hårek rokne Just finished watching this, and I was pleasantly surprised by what it had to offer. All of the characters portrayed were done so with just the right amount of depth, respect and for lack of a better word.. Love. It's quite an interesting story of a tightly knitted group of cops who went a little bit too far, and for one of them, it became too much of a burden, yet he still has to remain loyal to his fellow officers.The movie plays like a halfway gangster, halfway courtroom - drama. And also contains a perfect amount of emotion in my opinion.I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in undercover cop movies, courtroom dramas, gangster movies and law and order in general.

alienworlds This film made a complete mockery of New Yorks finest, depicting them as greasy -see a word I can't use here-maybe with justification, I wonder. I can't even tell if that was the film makers intention. The dialogue is probably realistic at least where the gangster types in the film are concerned, and maybe for that reason alone it is worth a look. I know that the lead cop character comes off like a shake and bake job ready for a rubber room about half a dozen times in the movie, which is a far cry from the same type of character in the film Serpico. Tough is lacking in this portrayal of a cop on the way to juggling candy canes. Long also, at almost two and one half hours. Maybe inspired by the film The Godfather, nowhere near as well done as that film. Maybe I am being too harsh, but I wasn't all that impressed with this movie.

jzappa "The law doesn't know the streets." But that doesn't mean that blurring the lines of the law is necessarily a good thing. Many law officials criticized this film during its release, perceiving it as glorifying its corrupt cops and vilifying the prosecutors who toiled to convict them. That is not what the film does. There are no black and white hats here. The story divides its characters into two sides, yes, but they are all struggling throughout to assert a concrete ideology within the oceanic gray area that is the law, and the good and evil it represents.The axis of the film is that Danny Ciello will not inform on his partners. Outside of his wife and kids, who know them like uncles, they are the only people who care about him. He will make the deal to talk about the involvement of narcotics in the corrupt activities of other cops, but not his dear and implicitly loyal friends. As we watch this movie, it is about narcs and New York City crime, but Sidney Lumet wants the underpinnings to be just as visible, how in a corrupt world, one cannot go straight without burning cherished bridges.Lumet gets to the heart of the war on drugs. And we see how it is, was, and will continue to be an utter failure. Addicts depend on the drug. Police depend on the continuation of the trade to uphold their status, and if not their status, their basic living condition. They know that if addicts are going to cooperate with them, they need their drugs. They know that if the courts are going to cooperate with them, drugs must be confiscated and accounted for. They know why they became cops, but they also know more than anyone else on their theoretical side of the law how miserable life is for a junkie. This is a lonely, dangerous and thankless dichotomy of a 24-7 job that's never finished, and if they want to skim a little drug money, that's their way of making it feel more worthwhile.Because Danny Ciello, based on New York cop Bob Leuci, who cooperated in a 1971 internal affairs investigation, is such a demanding and grueling role, almost always on screen in stressful, tiresome and emotional situations, I spent a good deal of the movie having trouble with the casting of Treat Williams. He was a no-name at the time, and that is what Lumet wanted, but there is something incongruously theatrical about Williams that is inconsistent with the rest of the actors. But he does convince us in the latter half of the film that he is falling to bits on account of his job, his testimony and the inextricable fate of the two that he will eventually have no choice but to rat on his friends.Prince of the City is a crime film, about cops, drug dealing, set in New York, and Lumet captures the gritty NYC streets of the 1970s that he encapsulated in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon as if the era had never left. But it's not a violent film at all. There are many characters, hardly any of whom we really get to know beyond their legal and moral standpoints in the story. There is a later scene wherein a meeting of prosecutors debate whether or not a charge of perjury is justified. Its ethical issues are passionate and effective to us, but the verdict is a coin toss in the political climate. The movie answers none of the gray questions posed. It only threatens with possible scenarios.

tieman64 Sidney Lumet's "Prince of the City" is an astonishingly in-depth portrait of the interlocking worlds of the police and the criminal. Dealing with drugs, cops and corruption, this is "Serpico" all over again, but it's revised, enlarged and in some places improved.Like "Serpico", this is also based on a true story. Treat Williams plays Danny Ciello, a cop working in an unsupervised special unit of the police force, whose methods of gathering evidence and confessions are somewhat unorthodox. However, when his conscience gets the better of him and he decides to blow the whistle on the corrupt behaviour in his department, Danny finds himself in the awkward position of having to choose between saving his own job and those of his partners, whom he refuses to indict. Though most people ignore him, Lumet's films sparkle with a sort of gritty authenticity. He's influenced everyone from Spike Lee to Scorsese, and many films owe their tales of corporate corruption and grungy moralising to Lumet. "Prince of the City" may itself be long and at times taxing, but its final 20 minutes make the long haul worth it, particularly Lumet's final lines, a direct challenge aimed at his audience.8.9/10 - Underrated.