Video Thursdays: To Live and Die in LA or 1980s SoCal Moby Dick

I saw the trailer for this film a couple weeks ago at my favorite local independent theater (The Beverly Theater) and having been born and raised in the LA area I thought it’d be a fun evening to time travel back to the 1980s Los Angeles. And the film did not disappoint as far as all that drum machine and synth soundtrack, the hazy orange Los Angeles skyline, buddy-cop loyalty dilemmas, graphic violence and over the top car chase. It was basically a feature length R-rated version of Miami Vice except that the bad guy is a counterfeiter instead of a drug smuggler and the cops are treasury department/secret service officers. In fact the film was so “Miami Vice” that they were sued by the makers of “Miami Vice” for plagiarism (but lost).

The film was based on a novel of the same name written by former Treasury Officer, Gerald Petievich, and there were numerous comments in the IMDB page about the accuracy of the counterfeiting process and law enforcement job depicted in the movie. I have to say that I was impressed by the level of detail in an early series of scenes showing all the work that the counterfeiter, Eric Masters, played by a very young Willem Dafoe, did to print up his currency. According to IMDB the film-makers hired two former-counterfeiters to supervise (off camera) the process and what they were doing on film was actually making counterfeit money. The one thing they did to help “insure” that none of this funny money would leave the set was that they put an “X” in the serial number of the currency. Nonetheless, some funny money did manage to “leave” the set and get passed as real currency. Oops.

The director, William Friedkin, who previously directed the award winning The French Connection, said that he worked from the notion that the whole world was counterfeit and that most just chose to ignore that fact and pretend to live a real life. Thus, even though the easy tag line listed on IMDB is “A fearless Secret Service agent will stop at nothing to bring down the counterfeiter who killed his partner,” what if “fearless” is really more like “self-righteous asshole,” with few redeemable qualities except his loyalty to the memory of his fallen partner? What if this “fearlessness” becomes a “Moby Dick” level of insanity where the Treasury cop, Richard Chance, played by CSI’s William Petersen, treats everyone, especially women, like shit and pretty much feels like anything is justified as long as he can catch Dafoe’s Masters. This is not Lethal Weapon, where the flawed hero basically outsmarts and outshoots everyone but has a strong moral core. That redeemable quality is completely missing from Treasury officer Chance, and it only gets worse or more obvious over the course of the film.

Speaking of Lethal Weapon, we do get a “I’m getting too old for this shit” quip from his first partner early in the movie and two years before Officer Martaugh says the same line in the first “Lethal Weapon” movie.

I knew nothing about the movie except for having seen the trailer going into my viewing, and was rewarded with Dafoe’s many-layered character, a crazy freeway car chase and a plot that wasn’t entirely predictable, except that I knew this wasn’t going to end well for anyone. I didn’t quite appreciate that L.A. is depicted as a hellhole overrun by criminals and weirdos and that most of the action doesn’t actually take place in the city of Los Angeles. But then again I know that Las Vegas and New York suffer from the same stereotypes and “editing.” After all, it is just a movie and not “real life.” Or is it?

[Movie viewed on 2025-06-12 at The Beverly Theater.]

I don’t quite agree that the movie is a “masterpiece” or find Chance anymore attractive than the “criminals,” but this is an interesting analysis of the movie (WITH NUMEROUS SPOILERS!!!).