The Rookie

Having salved his artistic conscience with White Hunter, Black Heart, Eastwood returned to the action-adventure genre with this astonishingly inadequate piece of piffle. Promoted to the Grand Theft Auto Division of the LAPD, rookie cop David Ackerman (Sheen) teams up with Nick Pulovski (Eastwood), a cigar-smoking ex-racing driver hell-bent on avenging his former partner's murder. Naturally, Ackerman at first despises his new colleague's working methods - beating people up, using his badge as an AMEX card, etc -but when Pulovski is kidnapped by fiendish, mustachioed hun Eric Strom (Julia), the nappie-brained new boy realises it's time to get manly forthwith. Directed by Eastwood with the same stupefied lethargy that characterises his performance, this tedious rites of passage movie is full of caricatured cops and robbers, and punctuated with interminably dull car-chases. Only Sheen's hysterically inept handling of the godawful dialogue relieves the boredom.