A Better Way to Die (2000)

A guy named Boomer (Scott Wiper) decides being a cop in Chicago sucks and leaves, to get back together with his old girlfriend. He stops to help someone whose car brokedown, only to knocked unconscious and have his car stolen.

At which point everything gets ridiculous. He's picked up by a one-armed man named Flash (Joe Pantoliano) on the hunt for a guy named Harry James. James is a fed that's gone missing after some sort of deal went wrong. They get ambushed, Flash gets killed, and Boomer only survives because one of the killers (played Andre Braugher) spares him at the behest of his cousin, who objects to killing an innocent schmuck.

When Boomer wakes up, he's back in Flash's car, but now it's being driven by the mother of Harry's kid, who contacted Flash in the first place and thought Boomer sounded like Harry over the phone. She has Boomer contact some blind slob Harry knew, pretending to be Harry to get a bead on where he's supposed to be, and from then on, it's everyone trying to kill Boomer because they think he's Harry. The feds show up, led by Lou Diamond Phillips as an alcoholic bent fed who probably invokes "national security" to get his drinks for free.

Absolutely stunned when IMDb said this movie was from 2000. Felt at least ten years older. So many guys with machine pistols, just spraying bullets everywhere and hitting nothing. Gratuitous cursing. Guys leaping backwards while firing their guns or trying to slide backwards while shooting. The girlfriend getting shot, just because.

Sometimes it feels like it's trying to be funny. The movie starts with Boomer about to go undercover at some sort of drug or gun meet. As in, it's going to happen in a few minutes, and the other two cops are still giving him advice like, "Curse more", and, "If you don't know what to do with your hands, scratch your balls. No one ever looked at a guy scratching his balls and thought that guy was nervous."

At another point, Boomer is on the run from the local hick cops after he accidentally shot the sheriff at the tail end of a gunfight in the local grocery store. He collapses in some old boy's shed, and the guy waves a shotgun, telling Boomer to leave. When Boomer pleads with him not to shoot that thing (because all the deputies are outside), the guy fires into the air, inciting the cops to open fire, killing the old boy and causing a fire that burns down the shed.

Braugher's character really wants to kill Boomer, but objects to the others prolonging the suffering, and they end up as, I don't even think they're uneasy allies. Boomer doesn't give a shit by then. Braugher's kind of manic in this, but it makes him more interesting than anyone else, since the rest of the cast are playing variations on "emotionally constipated hard man."

Also, I'm not if Boomer is meant to be read as autistic, or OCD or something. He does this thin after stressful situations where he taps one side of his head with two fingers. When pressed if he's nervous, he always mechanically replies, "Nobody's nervous." His watch is set to go off at meal times, which he announces like, "9:00. Breakfast time. Breakfast time is 9:00." It was an odd performance, because he seems like he's just out of it for long stretches. Maybe that's all the concussions from getting knocked out.