HOO-AHH!!!

After watching him chew up his lines, the scenery and gutless 60 Minutes producers in The Insider, I've gone off on a Pacino jag. My latest find is Sea of Love, a 1989 procedural that might have been easy to miss on release, but has aged better than most of its contemporaries. (We're all still waiting for the Look Who's Talking retrospective at the Brattle...)

Pacino is a 20-years-on-the-force heavy drinking NYC detective, who passes on retirement to hunt a serial killer. Ellen Barkin and Her Generous Rack is Pacino's Love Interest and Suspect #1.

Sea of Love is packed to the gills with familiar character-actor faces (what's the opposite of has-been? Will-be?), including Michael O'Neill, who later made his bones as Bartlet's secret service chief on West Wing. Another future West Wing roller John Spencer gets a few lines in the obligatory your-shield-and-piece-on-my-desk Lieutenant role. Pre-Royale-With-Cheese / Tyranny-Of-Evil-Men-Jules Samuel Jackson plays, uuh, "Black Guy." You can't make this shit up. That's one step up the career ladder from Jackson's stellar performance as 'Gang Member #2" in Ragtime, I guess. Rounding out the cast is the venerable CK model John Goodman, Pacino's partner and occasional waiter.

If you were to leave out Barkin's wardrobe (as she herself does, often enough), there is little to date this picture to the tacky 80s. NYC is still more gritty 70s gangland than Disneyland. Pacino's drunk-dialing-the-ex-wife cop stays barely sober enough to do his job. There isn't a cellphone to be seen. All that is missin is a waka-chica waka-chica funk soundtrack and B-roll of bums standing around burning barrels. And the barman pouring Pacino's "Double Dewar's" order out of a Jack Daniels bottle -- what, you thought we wouldn't catch that?

Sex, booze, violence, suspense: solid three stars.