#264: Rent-a-Cop

Release Date: November 27th, 1987

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Michael Blodgett and Dennis Shryack

Directed by: Jerry London

2.5 Stars

When Rent-a-Cop was released back in the fall of 1987, it was met with lukewarm reviews and little-to-no fanfare. Despite a budget of $16 million and some great Chicago filming locations, it recouped less than half a million at the box office and now, 40 years later, is largely forgotten.

That’s too bad. Watching it tonight, I think the film has developed a wistful, wonderfully sad patina in the years since its release.  

Directed by Jerry London, a journeyman director of mostly made-for-TV movies, and written by the screenwriting team of Michael Blodgett and Dennis Shryack (Turner & Hooch), Rent-a-Cop is standard genre fare, about a disgraced cop, Tony Church (Burt Reynolds), avenging the deaths of his fellow officers in a drug bust gone wrong. Church will need the help of a brassy prostitute, Della (Liza Minelli), who witnessed the massacre and can help him ID the killer. Despite their unlikely partnership, the two protagonists eventually develop feelings for each other and an opposites-attract romance unfolds about how you would imagine. 

It’s a comfortable, but hardly ambitious plot that you’ve seen versions of before. It might be why audiences reacted with a collective shrug of the shoulders upon its release.

But now Rent-a-Cop serves as a great, sad little time capsule that I found quite moving.

Burt Reynolds, arguably the biggest movie star of the 1970s, hadn’t yet hit a career rock bottom with Rent-a-Cop, but you can see the writing on the wall. Just a decade earlier he was so full of swagger and easy charm, but in Rent-a-Cop he seems stiff and out of place. He was 50-years-old during the filming, and he looks every day of it. Years later Reynolds would disclose that he was privately battling an addiction to pain killers through the 1980s as a result of all those years of doing his own stunts, and you can see signs of his physical pain in Rent-a-Cop. His performance isn’t bad, but you can sense him gritting his way through these scenes. 

In contrast, Liza Minelli seems ecstatic to be on the big screen. Her presence is delightfully broad and likeable, probably because this was her first show biz project in years. Like Reynolds, Minelli was also battling addiction problems and prior to filming Rent-a-Cop had committed herself to the Betty Ford Clinic for five years to get off booze and diet pills. In her performance as Della, she looks healthy and eager to re-start her career with a bang. Of course, though, that didn’t work. Rent-a-Cop flopped and Minelli’s film career fizzled out shortly thereafter.

It’s in this context that Rent-a-Cop is imbued with a bittersweet pathos. Here we have two Hollywood legends with their best years behind them, both playing characters they are about ten years too old to play. It’s a bit sad. They must have been thinking, sure, this is just some mediocre genre flick with a silly title, but if we can make it work together, maybe we can resurrect our careers?

Who cares if audiences weren’t buying it at the time. It’s a lovely sentiment that makes Rent-a-Cop worth watching today.