44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out

On 28 February 1997, two men heavily armed with AK-47 try to heist the Bank of America of North Hollywood, but their plan fails and they are kept under siege by the LAPD. Along forty-four minutes, Los Angeles witnesses live on television one of the greatest shoot-out of the American history.

Based on a true event, this movie impresses regarding the scenes of intense shoot-out, with the cast having also great performances. However, the statements of the characters, showing the LAPD as a brotherhood or family, do not seem to correspond to the reality showed in other police stories in American movies. Anyway, this film is a surprisingly good and worthwhile entertainment. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "44 Minutes - O Tiroteio de North Hollywood" ("44 Minutes - The North Hollywood Shoot-Out")

I watched this on cable the other night and was very pleasantly surprised. It's well done, with solid acting from old pros Madsen and Van Peebles and very tight directing. The documentary style works well, and unlike most cops vs. robbers movies it shows the motivation and thoughts of the bad guys without glorifying them. It's obviously a bit of a PR piece for the LAPD, but it also makes some really good points about the availability of assault weapons and the failings of the justice and political system in keeping crooks from getting them. The locations used in the movie were the actual locations where the shootout took place, and this added immeasurably to the realism of the story. This film is a real cut above most cable fare and is really worth watching.

Since I was only about two miles away from the real shootout and saw the footage on the news about 100 times, I was quite interested in seeing the movie to see how accurately it would depict the real event. The film was not only accurate (with very few exceptions) but it was also riveting (with the shootout edited together with documentary-style testimonials from the policemen characters) and peppered with some FX-style swearing and graphic moments. Of the actors, Michael Madsen and Mario Van Peebles were the best (and most well known) and Ron Livingston was good too, but seemed a bit out of place as a hard-edged, SWAT team member. Interesting tidbits were that the gunmen's full names were never mentioned (one was referred to as Larry a few times, but nothing else) and the gunmen characters looked nothing like the real gunmen (the wrong one had long hair and one of the real guys was about 100 pounds heavier than the other). Also, Michael Madsen, who is often confused with Tom Sizemore, who was in the 1995 film Heat, brings up Al Pacino's character from Heat in one of his testimonials. Heat is often mentioned in the same breath as the real North Hollywood incident, because of the similar shootouts and the fact that the real gunmen used the movie as an informal training video for robbing banks. The real gunmen also were nicknamed the 'High Incident Bandits' and the shootout was also the basis for the final episode of the 1996-97 ABC cop show 'High Incident' starring Blair Underwood. Good film.

Plays off as a "day in the life of" at first, which was a pretty good move, I thought. Kind of "Cops"ish, with periodic interjections from the officers involved in the shootout, which does well to give the viewer the mindset of the people. I had a problem with some of the scenes of the two gunmen alone, making comments back and forth, which we don't really know what they were thinking, or saying, since it isn't like they are available anymore to tell us. But, dramatic license and all, it's hardly anything that Fox can't be forgiven for doing. They did an exceptional job with the firefight. You really get a sense of the sheer chaos that was happening then. The freeze frame cuts for commercial breaks were a nice touch as well, giving you a snapshot of the moment, which as I understand, happens in the mind of people in these types of situations sometimes.

The movie was credible, and nicely done. You don't get the full effect by just watching the action in the last hour. The narrations given, and the scenes from the first hour, help set the tone for what started out as an average work day in Los Angeles, but then sank an entire area into a heated war zone before lunchtime had even come around. Wouldn't have been one I'd have paid money to see, but for a made-for-TV-movie, I've seen a whole lot worse, but more importantly, not many better.

After watching the film then doing the research of what really happened, I didn't know what was more unbelievable the film or the raw footage on you tube, even though the film doesn't stick to all of the facts I still couldn't believe that two guys caused that much chaos.

The film seen as it is is actually pretty good but I think after seeing some of the raw footage this film would've been a lot better if it stayed closer to the facts in order to add to the realism, but like I said the overall film isn't bad at all, the performances were great all around, Micheal Madsen's character was likable especially over what he does at the beginning of the film.

Personally I liked the film but would've honestly proffered a different take on the subject matter, at least this film doesn't glorify the robbers by portraying them as the victim.