The Rookie (1990)

Eastwood’s forgettable detective flick with Charlie Sheen

This is another Clint Eastwood cop thriller. What immediately comes to mind? The five Dirty Harry films, right? Or “The Gauntlet” (1977)? All great or near-great Eastwood cop pictures. So you'd expect the same from 1990's “The Rookie,” costarring Charlie Sheen as the sidekick. Well, you'd be wrong.

Something keeps “The Rookie” from attaining the heights of those other Eastwood cop films. It even pales compared to “Tightrope” (1984) and “Blood Work” (2002). Don’t get me wrong, there are some entertaining elements and the thrills certainly pick up in the overblown last act, but the flick’s too contrived and even falls into camp territory at times.

Furthermore, Sheen’s unconvincing as a tough cop who can singlehandedly take down a bar on the wrong side of town, not to mention the miscasting of Latino’s Raul Julia and Sonia Braga as German villains. While Braga is stunning, she’s not utilized to her potential; neither is Lara Flynn Boyle. Meanwhile Tom Skerritt is wasted in a trivial role as Sheen's rich dad.

So this is a disappointing, even laughable Eastwood cop flick and rightly forgotten. The constant macho f-bombs don't help. Still, there are enough engaging moments to make it worth catching if you can laugh with it.

The movie runs 2 hours and was shot in the Los Angeles area.

GRADE: C/C-

Decent action flick, rubbish buddy cop movie.

The reason for the latter is that Clint Eastwood and Charlie Sheen just don't really work as a pairing, when I think of great buddy cop duos - see the preceding 'Lethal Weapon' or the succeeding 'Rush Hour' - I always recall the banter and that the two are subconsciously looking out for each other. Here, it just felt like Eastwood and Sheen weren't connected - despite being policing partners.

The action elements help raise this film from the depths though, as all the set pieces and stuff like that come off - there's one scene that Michael Bay would love, I'm sure. The support cast are alright too, I recognised - among one or two others - Xander Berkeley and Tony Plana.

Despite those (minor) positives, the initially mentioned parts override them in 'The Rookie'. These type of films need to make you love watching the two leads together, but here I simply didn't - they make for an average partnership, at best.

There is a movie with James Woods that I keep mistaking for this one.

Anyway, it falls under the "What did you expect?" category of flick. It's not good... it's not bad either. No one expected it to be a box office bomb, no one expected it to be the next big thing either.

They set out to make a fun and entertaining throw away cop movie and that was exactly what they ended up making, a fun and entertaining action flick.

And that is all it is, something to like and throw away, so it did it's job.

Pretty paint-by-numbers buddy-cop movie where Eastwood pretty much plays a Harry Callahan and Charlie Sheen completely miscast as the titular rookie character. Raul Julia, a Puetro Rican playing a German, seemed to be having a good time at least. The action and stuntwork was at least top notch making for an enjoyable enough watch even if the movie was a good 15-20 minutes too long. Certainly this was Eastwood's lesser work, both as an actor and director. As a side, Sonia Braga was a hottie. 2.75/5