ChrisGorak Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Some police departments have a unit called the Special Investigations Section, where officers focus on catching dangerous, violent criminals in the act. The Los Angeles Police Department, fairly infamous for a lot of things anyway, has a SIS unit that's frequently been the subject of scrutiny for the way its officers operate under, ahem, somewhat looser rules than regular cops. And now somebody's making a movie about it!

A movie about cops who are loose cannons and don't play by the rules but they get the job done? What a fresh concept! I hope one of them gets shot when he only has two weeks left till retirement. I'm not quite sold on the title, either: At the moment, it's called SIS, though I bet Warner Bros. changes it before the film hits theaters. (Seriously, SIS? What do they call the cops in that unit? SISsies?)

From The Hollywood Reporter comes news that Warners is moving ahead with the project, with casting currently underway and Chris Gorak set to write and direct it. Gorak is a former art director (Fight Club and Minority Report represent some of his best work) who wrote and directed 2006's Right at Your Door (pictured), a fine psychological thriller about a dirty bomb that goes off in L.A. and separates a contaminated woman from her clean husband. The eight or nine people who saw Right at Your Door (rent it!) are pretty interested in seeing what Gorak does next, so I'll be keeping my eye on SIS.

This might seem like faint praise for a feature film, but Right at Your Door plays out almost exactly like a well-crafted episode of The Twilight Zone. It starts out with a topical premise -- a dirty bomb explodes during rush hour in L.A. -- and then uses it to set up an interesting (if implausible) moral conundrum between its two leads, a husband and wife played by Mary McCormack and Rory Cochrane. The attack happens shortly after McCormack's character leaves the couple's modest L.A. home one morning, and within minutes the news media is reporting a breakdown in basic police and hospital services due to overwhelming need, and warning residents that the smoke cloud from the explosions contains deadly toxic gas, and that anyone who was near the blast site is now a lethal carrier of said toxin. Fearing for his life, the panic-stricken husband seals up all of the doors and windows in the house, and just as he's finishing, his soot-covered wife comes staggering up to the door, demanding to be let in. Should he let her?

Not to belabor this point, but the Twilight Zone analogy is so apt, in fact -- the focus of the film is completely on two characters, there's a ticking-clock situation, and there's the moral paradox offered up for the audience to chew on -- that if a thirty-minute cut of the film were presented as the opening episode of a New, New Twilight Zone, I imagine it would get solid reviews for upholding the basic framework of the old show. As a feature film, Right at Your Door is manipulative, to be sure, but also clever enough to be fun -- and the whole thing benefits hugely from solid acting by both McCormack and Cochrane, who have to scream, cry, panic, collapse into depression and perform just about every other kind of big acting move that you can imagine. It also contains some kernels of realism, as when it correctly imagines how easily a city overwhelmed by panic could be become the province of capricious, trigger-happy soldiers and badly-thought-out plans by roving gangs of civilians.