Acting & technical talent, inner-city location settings, and the usual bladder-bursting length of celluloid are here wasted on a plotline so old it's age exceeds the applicable cliche that 'even its grey whiskers have grey whiskers', which has been very badly hacked into a new film tale of 90s Urban America.<br /><br />Plot's the one about the two comrades who find the home turf awash in crime and, while taking on the baddies, one gets killed, so the other sets out beyond the limits of the law to avenge his buddy - by donning a black mask, raiding the hideout singlehanded, making off with the swag, and giving all to the church save just enough to provide for his pal's surviving family. Mortified and broke baddies then deduce who was that masked man anyhow, go for the revenge, but end up getting their just desserts instead and the hero rides off in the sunset.<br /><br />It's been best done in movies as various Robin Hoods, Zorros, and Lone Rangers, but has also served uncounted zero-budget "B" westerns, costume actioners, serials and cop pics since fiction film first unspooled, particularly during the pre-WWII period. Here it's been revamped for the 90s action crowd as a detectives-vs.-druglords opus.<br /><br />Appearance is that someone liked this plot - why else try to revive it again? - but the lone screenwriter-director couldn't really figure out anything original to do with it, so he opted for the approach of the old B's, namely, just give it the most predictable, simplistic rendition from start to finish, then pad with extranea to stretch it to feature length as needed.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the old "B's" done this way needed padding to get 30 minutes of story up to 60 minutes of feature film, but now is needed over an hour to reach the post-modern 10-reel standard. Worse still, filler at least used to be action material, but here most of it is Soap Opera, recurring diversions into the Private Emotional Relationships of the two detectives, the hero and his wife, the hero-plus-wife and the victim's three children (who, as per tradition, they take in to raise as their own), while the advertising sets us up for cop action.<br /><br />Lots of crying and bonding, bonding and crying. Yet this potentially moving and engaging stuff *is* just padding, stuck in between very occasional action scenes as long, loooonnnnnggg vignettes which are then either just left behind or just magically resolved: e.g., after 20 minutes of closeup on the oldest girl's first 48 hours of stages-of-grieving, we jumpcut to some action, and she is just next - and last - seen frolicking off on a tricycle at her new home, daddy's loss just no longer to be at issue, and the part just as suddenly becomes an 'extra'.<br /><br />Film is literally past 75 minute mark before lone-masked-avenger is introduced - and the scene's a howler, as the Diminutive Dick (Keaton) rams through the crimelord's door with one kick, oversized shiny revolvers waving wildly, screaming and frothing behind an oversized ski-mask for everybody to hit the floor. But the unintended comic relief's only virtue is that it allows us to laugh out the tension built by the omnipresent question, 'Is this picture really going to take off and do something exciting; or did I misread the ads?'<br /><br />Unfortunately, relief is brief, because now there's not enough film-time left to do anything with this 'new' tack in any detail. Or our writer couldn't think of anyplace interesting to go with it. So we're just predictably trotted through the gang's retaliation and the hero's triumph, 1-2-3. Nagging realistic questions, raised by the nagging "realistic" backdrop of the film and all the earlier nagging "realistic" tearjerker sequences - such as, how's our reallife cop going to avoid the statutory consequences of going over the edge, no matter how much one may sympathize with him - are then disposed of in a coda-quickie (maybe two minutes) with the Detective Chief simply *summarizing* the wrap-ups to his "one good cop".<br /><br />Some sex'n'language stuck in with the episodic violence, but nothing unexpected there, and as we said earlier, production values are the usual 'best that money can buy' in spite of the sickly script; so we give it an IMDb "2", and no more.<br /><br />