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Firstly, this will go into spoilers for Hollywood Homicide, so if you haven’t seen the film… well, I just wouldn’t even bother.

Hollywood Homicide is as straightforward and cliché as they come. Given what one expects from a buddy-cop movie, it’s thin on laughs and action. There’s no suspense, or any major twists. In fact, it’s more about cops focused on their own problems rather than solving a case.

After a group of rappers known as H2O Klick are shot at a nightclub, Hollywood homicide detectives Joe Gavilan (Harrison Ford) and K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett) are both assigned to the case. Their investigation has them discover that when the rappers tried to break out on their own, their boss, record producer Antoine Sartain (Isaiah Washington) had been embezzling money, and to prevent them from speaking out, Sartain ended up having them killed.

Produced by Revolution Studios and distributed by Columbia Pictures, Hollywood Homicide had a production budget of $75 million. It opened on June 13, 2003 and charted at #5 with a disappointing $11.1 million on its opening weekend. It took just $30.9 million at the US box office. International grosses accounted for $20.2 million, totalling to a worldwide gross of $51.1 million. The film was a flop. There’s a lot wrong with Hollywood Homicide, so it’s not hard to see why.

The shooting of rappers that sets the whole thing in motion just isn’t strong enough. It sounds rather mundane, especially when compared to the case Gavilan and K.C. start investigating at the end of the film, which seems far more interesting (“We have a body and a half with some pieces missing”). I imagine that part of the reason is so that more time can be spent on the personal issues of the characters Joe Gavilan and K.C. Calden. Unfortunately, these aren’t very interesting either.

Gavilan wants to go into real estate. He’s struggling to sell a house and also has internal affairs investigating him for, “commingling funds” (an unnecessary subplot). K.C. wants to be an actor and teaches Yoga on the side. While they would obviously be happier doing other things, it’s clear that neither of them want to be with the police anymore. K.C. spells it out effortlessly when he says, “I don’t think I want to be a cop anymore.” The crime here is selling an action movie where the two lead police detectives aren’t even interested in their jobs, and they treat the case like it’s a burden. With that in mind, why should we invest our time in watching them?

Robert Souza, a former police detective at the LAPD, had worked with writer/director Ron Shelton as an advisor on his previous film, the gritty police drama Dark Blue. So Shelton brought him along as a co-writer for Hollywood Homicide, incorporating his experience from real-life events. One of those includes a real-estate subplot.

As well as being a police detective, Gavilan boasts about being a real estate broker, and slips it in at almost every opportunity, even to a group of strangers on an elevator. It turns into a wastefully lengthy subplot that fails to add anything. Its inclusion only came about because Souza also happened to moonlight as a real estate broker while he was working for the LAPD. Just because he did it in real life doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing to include in the film.

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