By Jonathan Price
So a few weeks after New Year’s we have two police films with old themes set in the two traditional American urban police meccas, New York and Los Angeles, though parts of the first were apparently shot in Louisiana, which has superior skyscrapers and a former mayor under indictment, which is eventually what happens to the New York mayor in Broken City. One way of thinking about film, other than wondering how faithfully it replicates the book on which it was based, is to think of it in terms of genres. These two, more or less, fit the cop genre, which arguably has replaced the Western genre, which reached its apogee in the 1950s, and began to be “revised” in the 1970s (think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller) before it dwindled to almost nothing in the current era.
