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"A dinosaur, a racist, a bigot, a misanthropist, a womanizer, a chauvinist, a misogynist, and a homophobe."  At least, that's how his teenage daughter sees him. Dave Brown is one of those cops who sees the street as a jungle, and considers himself its king - he's judge, jury and executioner, if he wants to be, because experience tells him that’s how the system works best.

Dave has a lot in common with other cops penned by the hard-boiled crime novelist James Ellroy: with Russell Crowe’s Bud White in LA Confidential, James Woods in Cop, and Kurt Russell in Dark Blue – guys who must have seen Dirty Harry when they were young and taken him as their role model. Where he differs from most of them, he’s also intelligent and articulate. He studied for the bar exam, and can look after himself in a disciplinary review – which is just as well.

He runs into trouble early in the movie when his police cruiser is sideswiped by another motorist; he chases down the culprit and beats the bejesus out of him with his nightstick right there in the middle of  a public park. Unfortunately for Dave the edited highlights don’t look too edifying on the evening news, and his timing is terrible. The entire department is under intense scrutiny for corruption.

Despite the title, the Rampart scandal of the late 1990s in which some 70 LAPD were implicated in multiple criminal activities, including theft, arson, blackmail and murder, mostly plays out in the background, which may be something of a missed opportunity (where’s Sidney Lumet when you need him?). But if any one individual has to stand for the sins of the many, Brown certainly has the shoulders for it.

Nicknamed “Date Rape” by his colleagues in honour of the serial rapist he consigned to the past tense, Dave is a real piece of work, though he denies racism. “I hate everybody,” he reasons. But for all his flaws (and there are many), there is something poignant about this walking anachronism. Maybe because we know that not so long ago – in the 1970s, certainly – he would have been the norm. The world has changed around him, but he is incapable of change. 

He lives next door to both of his ex-wives, who happen to be sisters (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche), and we get enough flashes of wit and strength from Dave to see what they saw in him. It’s also significant that he didn’t marry a bimbo. These are smart, intelligent women – just like the attorney (Robin Wright) he picks up in a bar. He’s middle aged, drinks and smokes too much, and eats too little, so he’s no longer the ladies man he thinks he is, but there’s an undertow of self-loathing in this behaviour too, as if he can’t bear himself much longer.

Scripted and directed by Oren Moverman (The Messenger), Rampart is a crisp, compelling piece of storytelling with juicy dialogue and stylish (sometimes distractingly so) camerawork. Admittedly we’ve seen this story many times now, but Harrelson brings conviction and complexity to the part – it’s too bad he didn’t get the Academy nomination he deserved. And look out for a typically brilliant cameo from the veteran character actor Ned Beatty, one of American movies great secret treasures.