Review: Dirty

Dirty is clumsier and less earnest than Crash, but it’s every bit as totalitarian.

Dirty
Photo: Silver Nitrate Releasing

Chris Fisher’s Dirty is clumsier and less earnest than Crash, but it’s every bit as totalitarian; the director’s idea of how racial hostility arises, expresses itself, and passes through Los Angeles is a fantasy only a person who’s never been the target of an ethnic slur could possibly mistake for truth. Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Salim Adel, a cop who follows the same boogie-man playbook used by Denzel Washington in Training Day and Matt Dillon in Crash, is teamed with Armando Sancho (Clifton Collins Jr.), a former gang member haunted by the shooting death of an old man Salim killed during the scene of a crime, on a mission that has them rubbing shoulders with the city’s black and brown lowlifes. While Sancho’s guilt wears on his conscience in the form of the old man’s jittery, wrinkled corpse (delusions straight out of The Ring that betray any pretense to reality the film often fronts), Salim busies himself scaring the shit out of white people looking for directions out of the film’s metropolis of evil and stuffing his fingers inside a Latina girl’s panties in order check if her cherry’s been popped. The man’s lack of decorum is matched only by that of Fisher’s aesthetic: choppy editing conjures the illusion of urgency, handheld camerawork strains for a faux sense of on-the-fly realism, and tribal music (like Crash’s Middle Eastern chants) condescendingly highlights a crucial moment of desperation. The film is a strange brew: an inquisition of racial and authority conflict with a J-Horror mindset. Like Paul Haggis before him, Fisher has fashioned an epic miscalculation.

Score: 
 Cast: Cuba Gooding Jr., Clifton Collins Jr., Cole Hauser, Wyclef Jean, Keith David, Taboo  Director: Chris Fisher  Screenwriter: Chris Fisher, Gil Reavill, Eric Saks  Distributor: Silver Nitrate Releasing  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: R  Year: 2005  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.