OFFICER DOWNE tells the story of the tough and hypermasculine eponymous L. A. police officer who is able to be resurrected each time he is killed, and a rookie officer who eventually finds out his secret while they confront a variety of colorful villains.
At least since SIN CITY (2005) there has been a relatively new subgenre of movies one might call "live-action adult graphic novels": live-action films which are based on adult graphic novels or at least emulate that form. The form can be recognized by the cartoon representation of reality both in style and content, flashy visuals, hyperkinetic action, frequently over-the-top hyperviolence and gore, frank sexual representations, and a story which is generally some variation of the fight between good and evil.
Even if the protagonists may seem to possess superhuman abilities, they are usually not superheros as those in the Marvel Universe, which I consider a distinct but closely related subgenre (perhaps live-action graphic novels without the "adult" part).
Unfortunately, SIN CITY is also by far the best example in this subcategory, as other movies which followed it consistently turned out to be inferior in one way or another.
DOWNE is technically more accomplished than films like ADAM CHAPLIN (2011) and HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (2011), but shares a common problem, which is that these films almost invariably suffer from a lack of tension due to the protagonist's overwhelming dominance over his enemies.
What elevates this film relative to the others is that the focus for much of the film is not on Downe, but a rookie officer who wants to be conscientious in an environment where everybody seems to have lost their conscience, and his effect on the former.
On the other hand, the cop fetishization of this film seems anachronistic in an age in which it has become evident that police brutality in real life is much more common than we imagined.
The cop fetish on display is actually multi-dimensional: on a social level, it will no doubt appeal to the "blue lives matter" crowd, but it also has a sexual dimension: Downe looks like an 80s S&M gay porn character, he literally has the biggest guns, other cops envy how freely he gets to metaphorically f*** over the criminals, and in one scene, Downe even says that bashing the criminals' heads makes his "dick hard", an organ he curiously fails to utilize when pleasuring his flame to literally dozens of orgasms. The absurdly high number of orgasms, complete with counter, seems almost like a fig leaf for the homoerotic undertones between the rookie and Downe.
Personally, I found the cop fetishization off-putting, but the biggest problem with the movie is that the caricature of the world it presents is so extreme that it becomes uninteresting. I put the blame for this squarely on the author of the graphic novel on which the film is based, and who also wrote the screenplay. I was able to see the first few pages on Amazon preview, and it seems the movie is very faithful to the graphic novel, which would mean that the shortcoming lies in the source material.
