Decades Before ‘The Rip,’ Joe Carnahan Took Ray Liotta on a Last-Minute Awards Season Run with ‘Narc’

Joe Carnahan is best known for making crime pictures — cops, informants, assassins, things this of this nature — and returns to that milieu with his new Netflix joint The Rip. But the presence of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in the movie emphasizes Carnahan’s real calling as a filmmaker: He has been put on this earth to give actors a grittier makeover. Damon and Affleck were last seen together flittering around the Nike offices in Air; now they’re cops stashing dirty money, probably turning on each other at some point. It’s not that Damon or Affleck couldn’t do that kind of role without Carnahan; more that he facilitates that kind of shift, whether for Liam Neeson (The Grey), Patrick Wilson (Stretch), a whole bunch of then-and-future stars (Smokin’ Aces), or, going all the way back to his sophomore feature, Ray Liotta as a loose-cannon cop in the 2002 feature Narc.

Granted, gritting up Ray Liotta seems like an exercise in redundancy. The man was rarely one to appear in zany rom-coms. Or if he does, it’s in Something Wild as the most dangerous man in an uncommonly menacing romance. When he did pop up in, say, a Muppet movie (he’s been in two!) or Bee Movie, it was usually to goof on his own reputation for outsized intensity, as established by his most famous role in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

A decade and change after that, what was there left for Carnahan to do with him, then? The thinking, when Narc received a late-2002 awards-qualifying run ahead of its wider debut the following January, was that maybe it could get him some awards attention. Something Wild was a little too offbeat for the Oscars, while Joe Pesci and Lorraine Bracco got the awards attention for Goodfellas. Narc was seen as a possible dark-horse contender, albeit briefly.

It’s easy to what fueled this hope: Training Day. A year earlier, Denzel Washington broke bad to play a corrupt cop opposite Ethan Hawke’s rookie in that movie; it finally won Washington a Best Actor Oscar, and propelled him to even bigger stardom. (His first post-Training Day movie? John Q, opposite Liotta.) The dynamic in Narc has some similarities; while Nick Tellis (Jason Patric) is far from a rookie, he’s an undercover cop rattled by an 18-months-earlier incident where his pursuit of a bad guy resulted in a tragic innocent death. Growing restless on an extended leave, Tellis is offered a chance to close a case in exchange for a return to the force at a desk job. He requests a pairing with the older, supposedly unstable Henry Oak (Liotta), attempting to solve the murder of a cop that Oak has taken personally. Oak doesn’t dominate Tellis with Denzel’s ferocity, but as in Training Day, the bigger star looms over his younger, less morally compromised partner.

More than 20 years ago, Narc felt like it was scraping the Detroit pavement pretty hard, all snowy streets, visible breath, spittle-flecked impromptu interrogation, guns with the serial numbers filed off. Revisited now, there’s still plenty of 2000s-era grit-flash, including a couple of the shakiest handheld shaky-cam chases that ever shook, and a Liotta performance that eventually erupts like a volcano. But it’s also noticeable how relatively pared-down and sometimes downright classical it feels as a stylish neo-noir.

For example, Carnahan shoots the first moments of the first conversation between Oak and Tellis from a distance in a shadowy diner, more casually hard-boiled than lathered up into a macho rage. The two aren’t really pitted against each other until the movie is almost over, and though Oak is clearly the more volatile of the two, it’s not as if he seems beyond the pale, either. In another scene, Oak talks about his dead wife and his history as a cop; it’s crime-movie boilerplate, but the way Carnahan both holds on Liotta and observes him through a reflective car window gives the textbook material visual depth. I remembered the movie as being pretty self-conscious about its own sharp edges, and at times it is, but Carnahan himself has upped the ante far enough that Narc now looks modest and scrappy. Which, of course, it also was – a low-budget indie making a play for a little awards love.

Oak’s arc is probably a little too telegraphed to really register as enough to reward Liotta, who, after all, makes it look like he can summon these feelings easily. It didn’t help that 2002 was stacked with formidable male performances. In the Best Actor category at the Oscars, Adrien Brody eventually won over a field that included Nicolas Cage (Adaptation), Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York), and Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt). Down in supporting, you had Chris Cooper, Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Christopher Walken, and none other than Paul Newman.

So there wasn’t necessarily room for Liotta among those, especially when considering that Narc, arresting as it is, never registers as ambitious on the level of a Scorsese crime movie. In retrospect, Narc introduced the next phase of Liotta’s career as blustery character actor. He went from leads and second leads throughout the ’90s to crime-movie overdrive (he’s part of the Smokin’ Aces ensemble, too). This probably did not need Carnahan to happen. Again, he wasn’t likely preparing a pivot to kindly-uncle parts. But Narc did give him the chance to do this material as a second lead. He gave plenty of colorful supporting performances between this one and his untimely death nearly 20 years later: Observe and Report, Killing Them Softly, and Marriage Story are among the many highlights. But he never really had a showcase like Narc again. Carnahan, too, more or less recused himself from awards plays going forward, almost as if out of respect – almost as if to say, look, these other guys need my help, but none of them will do it better than Liotta.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.