Word: pacino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pacino plays the cop summoned for undercover work along Christopher St. because he looks remarkably like all the victims of the "Homo Killer" and might attract him. "Have you ever had your cock sucked by a man?" detective Captain Paul Sorvino asks. "Huh?" responds Pacino. "You gotta be kiddin." But no one is kidding and Pacino takes the assignment for the chance to skip patrol duty and the opportunity to nab a gold detective's badge...
...Pacino trundles Serpico-style to Greenwich Village and sets up shop. He spends days with his nextdoor neighbor, Ted (Don Scardino), a gay playwright ("you know, boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets analyst") who is scared to death of cruising, preferring to frequent more traditional gay cafes that Friedkin never shows. Nights, Pacino cruises, donning his leather outfit like a pudgy boy pulling on his first Halloween costume. Later, of course, the leather will no longer be a costume and Pacino will stop fumbling with the cruising paraphernalia. He will fit into the crowd in that hole across...
...real problem with Cruising is Friedkin's inability to deliver what should have been a brilliant thriller about sex and death. This film muffles a potentially explosive premise. In order to trap a psychopathic murderer who preys on gays, Cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) adopts a fictive homosexual identity and blends into the rough S-M scene. Gradually he zeroes in on the killer, but not without paying a weird price: Burns begins to lose his real-life grip on heterosexuality...
...fouled up. As a simple detective story, the film is defeated by narrative loopholes, unconvincing plot twists and the last-minute injection of a demon who seems to have drifted in, half-baked, from The Exorcist. The psychological drama is forfeited by the handling of the central character. Though Pacino is in sensitive, even witty, form, he just does not have enough to do. Except for a few costume changes and some brief, cryptic conversations with his girlfriend (Karen Allen), his personality transformation is left undramatized. There are no scenes that clearly show Burns' descent into a personal hell...