Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

jzappa "The law doesn't know the streets." But that doesn't mean that blurring the lines of the law is necessarily a good thing. Many law officials criticized this film during its release, perceiving it as glorifying its corrupt cops and vilifying the prosecutors who toiled to convict them. That is not what the film does. There are no black and white hats here. The story divides its characters into two sides, yes, but they are all struggling throughout to assert a concrete ideology within the oceanic gray area that is the law, and the good and evil it represents.The axis of the film is that Danny Ciello will not inform on his partners. Outside of his wife and kids, who know them like uncles, they are the only people who care about him. He will make the deal to talk about the involvement of narcotics in the corrupt activities of other cops, but not his dear and implicitly loyal friends. As we watch this movie, it is about narcs and New York City crime, but Sidney Lumet wants the underpinnings to be just as visible, how in a corrupt world, one cannot go straight without burning cherished bridges.Lumet gets to the heart of the war on drugs. And we see how it is, was, and will continue to be an utter failure. Addicts depend on the drug. Police depend on the continuation of the trade to uphold their status, and if not their status, their basic living condition. They know that if addicts are going to cooperate with them, they need their drugs. They know that if the courts are going to cooperate with them, drugs must be confiscated and accounted for. They know why they became cops, but they also know more than anyone else on their theoretical side of the law how miserable life is for a junkie. This is a lonely, dangerous and thankless dichotomy of a 24-7 job that's never finished, and if they want to skim a little drug money, that's their way of making it feel more worthwhile.Because Danny Ciello, based on New York cop Bob Leuci, who cooperated in a 1971 internal affairs investigation, is such a demanding and grueling role, almost always on screen in stressful, tiresome and emotional situations, I spent a good deal of the movie having trouble with the casting of Treat Williams. He was a no-name at the time, and that is what Lumet wanted, but there is something incongruously theatrical about Williams that is inconsistent with the rest of the actors. But he does convince us in the latter half of the film that he is falling to bits on account of his job, his testimony and the inextricable fate of the two that he will eventually have no choice but to rat on his friends.Prince of the City is a crime film, about cops, drug dealing, set in New York, and Lumet captures the gritty NYC streets of the 1970s that he encapsulated in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon as if the era had never left. But it's not a violent film at all. There are many characters, hardly any of whom we really get to know beyond their legal and moral standpoints in the story. There is a later scene wherein a meeting of prosecutors debate whether or not a charge of perjury is justified. Its ethical issues are passionate and effective to us, but the verdict is a coin toss in the political climate. The movie answers none of the gray questions posed. It only threatens with possible scenarios.

ValerinAmberz ****warning spoilers ahead ****This is a flawless movie. A tear-jerker for men. Real men. About integrity and its cost. How people that tries to do the right thing are punished, and how hypocrites are the only ones getting out of it unharmed. It's the same old story of the Scorpio and the frog. (the prosecutors being the Scorpio in this example).Etiher you come totally clean or you lie every step of the way. This movie shows that what's even more important than choosing to be clean or dirty, is the choosing to be consequent. To stick with what you are no matter what. Even if its not who you really are. Once you have made your choice there is no turning back. If you are going to judge bad guys you will have to be able to do the same with yourself and the ones closest to you. Watching a well intentioned but naive Ciello having to destroy the lives of everybody he knows and loves the most, is a sad, honorable and at the same time bittersweet journey. But along the way the honor gets lost in the overwhelming suffering. And no honor in the world can cure that. To me the morality of the tale is brave in its inmorality; It's not worth it. You don't have to be selfish or bad to consider that it's more important to save human beings of flesh and blood than to uphold a system that still even without your testimony is being compromised every day. Maybe that's why this movie couldn't get more recognition Oscar-wise. It's too morally daring. And you can't reward a movie that basically says that sometimes lying is the right thing to do. At least that was my interpretation of it. The last scene sort of tells me: this was what he got out of it. It wasn't worth it. The best of its kind. "Insider" with Russel Crowe /Al Pacino tried to do something similar, but never came close to this. So intelligent, intriguing and moving. Bravo.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** Overly long and ponderous crime drama involving an elite squad of New York City detectives who take the law into their own hands in fighting the drug epidemic that pledged the Big Apple back in the 1970's. The way these elite cops fight crime is by ripping off the drug dealers that they bust and then, being illegal aliens, ship them off on the first boat or plane back to their native country.With the Chase Commission breathing down corrupt cops necks one of the members of this elite group of law enforcers Danny Ciello, Treat Williams, seeing the writing on the wall decides to come clean. Danny will talk and use a wire but only on dirty politicians and lawyers, as well as D.A's, but not cops especially those cops, or partners, that he works with. This very "high and noble" effort on Danny's part, which was really to save his own hide, has him record hundreds of conversations between him as well as lawyers hoodlums and junkies that in the end would result in some 30 convictions. Danny also gets all of the members of his elite squad indited with the exception of the weak willed and suicidal Officer Bill Mayo ( Don Billett), who ended up blowing his brains out, for crimes that Danny himself committed!It's hard to work up any sympathy for the cops in the movie "Prince of the City" in not only how greedy corrupt as well as, when they's riding high, arrogant they are but how totally lacking and unwilling their in taking their punishment when caught! This to the point of giving up their best friends or partners to the Chase Commission inquisitors in order to save themselves.Danny who's supposed to be the hero in the movie is so gutless and wimpy when he's caught with his hand in the cookie jar, by perjuring himself 40 times after he supposedly came clean, that it seems like the biggest crime in the movie is him getting off Scot-free in the end! Were told by the D.A's office that the only reason that Danny was sprung was that by inditing and convicting him after ratting on his own fellow cops, as well as other members of the law enforcement community, no one like him, a corrupt cop who gets nabbed, will come forward in the future to do the very same thing! Way to go Danny Boy!The movie goes into the sleazy business of cops being drug suppliers to junkies to get information on their suppliers which in fact is who the police are! We see a number of hair-rising scenes of junkies going into convulsions and almost dropping dead because they can't get their fix that are as disturbing as anything you'll see in a slasher horror movie. Danny who's arrogance and false bravado in showing how tough, as well as stupid, he is has him expose himself to his fellow cops as well as the hoodlums that he's secretly recording. This, with his cover now completely blown, has Danny become such a crying sorry a** of a man that even his old lady Clara,Lindsay Crouse, has in the end far more male testosterone's then he does. The at first macho, where things were going his way, Danny Ciello turns into a Valium popping crybaby by the time the movie is just about over when he gets his big moment testifying in open court. Danny by then afraid of his own shadow needs to get himself up to testify by downing at least three Valium tablets, chased down with a couple shots of scotch, just to get on the stand!The most telling scene in the movie has to do with Danny having a talk with his Mafia Uncle Nick's, Ronald Maccone, good friend Mafia soldier Rocky Gazzo, Tony Munafo, who incidentally Danny was setting up by secretly recording their conversation. Rocky somehow sensing what a back-stabbing wimp Danny is tells him right to his face what he, which the movie proves, never would dream of doing. Do you think I'm afraid of going to jail! I spent half may life behind bars and most of the time I spent there was for keeping my mouth shut and not ratting out my friends Rocky tells Danny. That's something that Danny as well as the sh*t-kicking elite members of his drug-busting unit would never have the guts, even to spend one day behind bars, to do.

tieman64 Sidney Lumet's "Prince of the City" is an astonishingly in-depth portrait of the interlocking worlds of the police and the criminal. Dealing with drugs, cops and corruption, this is "Serpico" all over again, but it's revised, enlarged and in some places improved.Like "Serpico", this is also based on a true story. Treat Williams plays Danny Ciello, a cop working in an unsupervised special unit of the police force, whose methods of gathering evidence and confessions are somewhat unorthodox. However, when his conscience gets the better of him and he decides to blow the whistle on the corrupt behaviour in his department, Danny finds himself in the awkward position of having to choose between saving his own job and those of his partners, whom he refuses to indict. Though most people ignore him, Lumet's films sparkle with a sort of gritty authenticity. He's influenced everyone from Spike Lee to Scorsese, and many films owe their tales of corporate corruption and grungy moralising to Lumet. "Prince of the City" may itself be long and at times taxing, but its final 20 minutes make the long haul worth it, particularly Lumet's final lines, a direct challenge aimed at his audience.8.9/10 - Underrated.