Internal Affairs

Internal Affairs [1990] [DVD]
Directed by Mike Figgis

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs makes great play with some fairly obvious ironies--"Trust me, I'm a cop", Richard Gere says to a couple for whom he is arranging the death of their parents--but its real strength lies in a cluster of central performances. Gere has rarely been better than he is as the charismatic, self-righteous entirely corrupt and corrupting Dennis Peck, but Andy Garcia is at least as impressive as the "selfish yuppy bastard", the ambitious Internal Affairs cop Avila whose determination to bring Peck down is as much to do with massaging his own ego as with fighting the good fight, particularly after Peck starts making moves on Avila's gallery curator wife. This is a film about men destructively manipulating each other's self-love--the two men have more in common than they like to admit, a point sardonically made by Amy, the world-weary lesbian cop who is Avila's partner (an impressive performance by Figgis regular Laurie Metcalfe). Internal Affairs was the best thriller of 1990 and one of the decade's best. --Roz Kaveney

Special Features
1.85 Anamorphic Wide Screen
DVD 5
German
English
English
Region 2
Dolby Digital 5.1 English\Dolby Digital Surround German
Dolby Digital 5.1
Dolby Digital Surround
Arabic\Bulgarian\Czech\Danish\Dutch\English\Finnish\German\Hungarian\Icelandic\Norwegian\Polish\Romanian\Swedish\Turkish

Synopsis
The plot of INTERNAL AFFAIRS is simple and familiar--good guy Raymond Avila (Andy Garcia) works for the internal affairs division of the LAPD and has to take down Dennis Peck (Richard Gere), a corrupt officer. The twist is that the film is really about social change in America. Gere plays Peck as an iconoclastic force of nature; he charms everyone he meets, runs the force by trading favors and protecting his own, and has eight kids with four wives. He sees himself as a throwback to an older notion of manhood and professional effectiveness. Avila, on the other hand, is a hero but also--as Peck calls him--a yuppie, seeking promotion in the internal affairs division and involved in a childless marriage with a successful museum curator (Nancy Travis). As Peck pushes Avila's buttons, the situation is further complicated by Avila's Latin temper--a kind of supressed, true ethnic self that increasingly reveals itself as the two men's struggle reaches a primal level. British director Mike Figgis is an outsider looking in, and his ideas about American society are to some extent generalizations, but nevertheless they have the ring of truth in this intense cop fable.

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