//

15 Famous Bad Movie Cops

“The most corrupt cop you’ve ever seen on screen,” reads the tagline on Rampart’s poster. These badge-defilers would beg to differ.

Rampart
Photo: Millennium Entertainment

Oren Moverman’s Rampart arrives in select theaters this weekend, adding Woody Harrelson to the pantheon of actors who’ve taken on crooked cop roles, playing officers who uphold the law about as well as a cheerleader holds her liquor. For decades, films have been infiltrated by serve-and-protect types who play both sides, abuse their powers, and leave behind paths of destruction. “The most corrupt cop you’ve ever seen on screen,” reads the tagline on Rampart’s poster. These 15 badge-defilers would beg to differ.


Gary Oldman

Gary Oldman in Léon: The Professional (1994)

This year’s Best Actor nominee certainly didn’t make his name playing the strong, silent, George Smiley type. He’s much better known for bringing to roaring life the most outsized character in the room, like Norman Stansfield, the crooked, druggie DEA he sleazily embodies in Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional. Never one to skimp on the morally bereft bad boys, Oldman nearly claimed an additional spot on this list for his mafia-linked Jack Grimaldi in Romeo is Bleeding, but best to keep the focus on this wired-up nutcase, who gets über pissed at Natalie Portman’s daddy for stealing blow, then blows him—and his wife, and his little boy—away.


Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson in Lakeview Terrace (2008)

Lakeview Terrace shows that living next door to a cop can royally suck, especially if that cop is Samuel L. Jackson’s conservative sociopath Abel Turner, who from day one is turned off by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington’s interracial marriage. Passive aggression leads to spotlights in windows, which, in turn, lead to bullets. The film’s race issues are more than a little problematic, but Jackson proves unnerving as someone with whom you definitely don’t want to share a property line.


Andy Lau

Andy Lau in Infernal Affairs (2002)

Though Matt Damon served it to the mainstream in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, it was Andy Lau who originated the role of a groomed gang member penetrating the police department in Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong hit on which Scorsese’s film is based. Released in its homeland in 2002, then rereleased in the U.S. by Miramax in 2004, the movie sees Lau square off against fellow superstar Tony Leung Chiu Wai, the soft-featured do-gooder to Lau’s hard-angled triad mole.


Ray Teal

Ray Teal in Ace in the Hole (1961)

Before he played Sheriff Roy Coffee on Bonanza, prolific side player Ray Teal appeared in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole as Sherriff Gus Kretzer, a shady New Mexico lawman easily swayed by an opportunistic journo (Kirk Douglas) to halt the rescue efforts for a man trapped in a cave. Superbly cast, Teal sees his character kick start the central plot, which involves Douglas’s drunken scribe exploiting the cave dweller’s misfortune to stay in the headlines.

Advertisement


James Cromwell

James Cromwell in L.A. Confidential (1997)

Spoiler alert: James Cromwell is the bad guy in L.A. Confidential. The guy, as they say, who gets away with it. The guy who sends all his detectives on a hunt for a killer when he’s the one with the smoking gun. Cromwell is almost always relegated to playing the decent older man, so to see him get his hands dirty—or, rather, wear O.J. gloves to keep his guilty hands clean—is refreshing indeed. He may not have the brute force of Russell Crowe or the jawline of Guy Pearce, but he sure knows how to enunciate a villain’s climactic manifesto.


Robert Patrick

Robert Patrick in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Shifty folks abound in our rogues gallery of unjust po-pos, but there’s only one shape-shifter (nyuk, nyuk) in the bunch: Robert Patrick’s scarily relentless T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. A highly versatile blob of liquid metal who can transform into everything from weapons to Jenette Goldstein, the faux patroller combats Schwarzenegger’s lumbering bravura with lethal finesse, and he can take more bullets—and bombs, and beatings—than any other cop in this list.


Howard Wendell

Howard Wendell in The Big Heat (1953)

In The Big Heat, a film that perhaps villainizes coffee even more than its chief antagonists, Howard Wendell plays your average joe-drinking commish, except for the fact that he’s in bed with the mob. Fritz Lang’s hard-hitting noir sees a detective Sergeant (Glenn Ford) dig up corruption after a fellow officer’s suicide, and by the time the plot snakes around to its conclusion, his efforts lead to the indictment of a head mafia boss (Alexander Scourby), and Wendell’s character, the boss’s ally on the sly.


Rosie Perez

Rosie Perez in Pineapple Express (2008)

Who said dirty cops all had to be played by men? Boasting a filthy mouth to boot, sass queen Rosie Perez dishonors her uniform with vigor in Pineapple Express, playing a murderous officer involved with the same pot ring that upends the lives of Seth Rogen and James Franco’s burnout buddies. She kills, kicks ass, and breaks traffic laws, but her worst offense is getting it on with Lumbergh himself, Gary Cole, whom she’s quick to call a “sexy motherfucker.”

Advertisement


Charles Durning

Charles Durning in The Sting (1973)

A cop repeatedly bamboozled by head con men Hooker (Robert Redford) and Gondorff (Paul Newman), Charles Durning’s Lt. William Snyder gets bitten by karma in The Sting, first taking counterfeit bills when pressing Hooker for part of a weaseled theft, then being the butt of a third-act double con that cements the lea duo as antiheroes to love. Another well-cast player, Durning seems just as at home in this film as he would in a later Depression-era dramedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.


Harvey Keitel

Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant (1992)

He doesn’t care about nuns getting raped, he doesn’t care how much coke goes up his nose, and, as evidenced by one particular viral still, he doesn’t always care to wear clothes, either. Before he breaks down and confesses his sins in a church (and long before Nic Cage got extra crazy alongside an iguana in an unofficial sequel), Harvey Keitel was one Bad Lieutenant, and surely the most self-destructive offender in this roundup. His nameless New York 5-0 nabs drugs from crime scenes, snorts them at his kids’ school, smokes crack, jacks off to underage girls, gets tens of thousands of dollars in the hole with sports bets, and we just stare on in wonder.


Ted de Corsia

Ted de Corsia in The Killing (1956)

An actor famous for playing gangsters and villains, like Joe Rico in The Enforcers and Willie the Harmonica in The Naked City, Ted de Corsia seems to have bad in his blood. In Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, he plays Randy Kennan, a corrupt cop and one part of a heist team assembled by head crook Johnnie Clay (Sterling Hayden). A gambler who ignores cries from the helpless to further his depravity, de Corsia bolsters a film that marked Kubrick’s meteoric ascent.


Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

Already iconic for embodying Hans Gruber, Alan Rickman gave the most unforgettable performance ever to appear in a Robin Hood film as the slithering Sheriff of Nottingham in Kevin Reynolds’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Unphased by runnning his cousin through with a broadsword, buddying up with an albino witch, or raping Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Nottingham is an oily-haired devil of charity depravation, and if you’ve got a problem with that, he’ll cut your heart out with a spoon.

Advertisement


Orson Welles

Orson Welles in Touch of Evil (1958)

When he wasn’t behind the camera capturing much-revered long takes and enough footage for multiple alternate cuts, Orson Welles was in front of it in Touch of Evil, playing Captain Hank Quinlan, the cop who terrorizes Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, who get too close to the fact that Quinlan’s been planting evidence to rack up his conviction tally. Extra heavy in both the eyes and the waistline, Welles gives his own film an especially potent formidability.


Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1971)

Immortalizing both Eastwood and the .44 Magnum, Dirty Harry surely offers the most famous bad cop on our list, with one of the most famous film quotes ever uttered. Eastwood may not be feeling so lucky these days, what with his latest baby, J. Edgar, getting the full-on Oscar brush-off, but few leading men can claim to have played so recognizable a character, who was never better displayed than in this debut Don Siegel installment.


Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington in Training Day (2001)

Denzel so often plays good, but he had to go real, real bad to net a Best Actor Oscar, elevating an Antoine Fuqua film to unrepeatable heights as Alonzo Harris in Training Day. Boisterously boasting superpowers that put King Kong to shame, Harris is a fascinating creature who devoured his own roots, only to later be swallowed by the neighbors he swore to protect. Washington thunders through this film to the end, and if you’ve ever considered giving angel dust a whirl, he’ll certainly scare you straight.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.