Clint Eastwood has acted and directed in many truly great films over the span of his lengthy career, but 1990's The Rookie, in which he's cast alongside Charlie Sheen and Raul Julia, really isn't one of them.

The movie follows a Los Angeles based detective named David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen) who, aside from having a tough job working undercover in the City of Angels, has got more than his fair share of personal problems to deal with. His dad, a rich guy named Eugene (Tom Skerritt), doesn't really want anything to do with him and lately he's having nothing but problems with his girlfriend, Sarah (Lara Flynn Boyle), who he just so happens to live with. If that weren't enough, David is also steel dealing with the guilt he carries around over the death of his younger brother, caused by an accident which he holds himself responsible for. In short, David is a bit of a wreck.

Happy to bust crooks for stealing cars in L.A., David teams up with a former race car driver named Nick Pulovski (Clint Eastwood) who has been working this beat for some time now. Nick's not exactly an angle himself, however, as he's got a pretty serious drinking problem and a very short temper. As they start getting used to working together and try not to drive each other insane, they soon find they have to bust a big time car theft ring run by a mean spirited German kingpin named Strom (Raul Julia) and his lady friend, Liesel (Sonia Braga). Nick takes this case pretty seriously, because Strom is the one who killed his last partner, and they both want to bring these bad guys in, but will they be able to work together long enough to make that happen before they're at each other's throats?

Directed by the usually very reliable and frequently very impressive Eastwood and based on a script co-written by Scott Spiegel, The Rookie has a pretty solid cast and could very well have wound up at least turning out to be a pretty enjoyable 'buddy cop' movie, the kind that the late eighties and early nineties were known for, but instead it plays to cliché after cliché and winds up rather dull and predictable. The jokes aren't all that funny, the humor isn't all that effective or interesting, and the storyline feels like it was based on a 'fill in the blanks' template of some sort. There's nothing here we haven't seen before, and done better at that.

The film starts out promisingly enough, with a solid and tense shoot out that sets the stage quite well and gets our expectations up accordingly, but soon dashes those expectations by dolling out only sporadic doses of action. The film is devoid of any truly memorable set pieces and while it's all well and good to drive a car right through a building, if you're going to set up your film to take place in that sort of 'realism doesn't matter here' cinematic world, don't then try to anchor it with ineffective human drama. The movie bounces from scenes in which are characters deal with their own emotional baggage to scenes involving ridiculous cops and robbers high jinks with little regard for tonal consistency or believability.

Performance wise, the film is a mixed bag. Eastwood is good as the crotchety old man - he excels in rolls like this and has always been good playing similar parts in films like the later entries in the Dirty Harry series and more recently Gran Torino. Here, however, he's basically playing the kind of character he's been stereotyped as, without the personality that any of his more memorable tough old guy characters have had to keep them interesting. He's fine in the role, but the role isn't all that great to begin with. Sheen is a bit smug in spots, a little obnoxious in others and while it's all well and good that he's in great shape and wants to show off his pecs for the camera, he's frequently sexing it up - but for what reason? It adds nothing. Lara Flynn Boyle and Raul Julia are amusing enough, but again, their characters are thin cutouts and don't have much to offer outside of simply fitting into a hole that the script needed plugged.

Ultimately, despite a few moderately exciting action scenes and a few lines of good dialogue, the film doesn't have much to offer. The drama isn't fleshed out well enough to matter and so the characters aren't all that interesting. The action is neither over the top enough or frequent and realistic enough to save the picture and as such, it all winds up as a rather dull movie that really should have been a whole lot better than it was.

Video:

The 2.40.1 VC-1 encoded 1080p anamorphic widescreen transfer on this Blu-ray release is little more than a notch above what you'd expect the standard definition release to look like. The image is consistently dirty and grainy and not in a cool, atmospheric way but in a distracting and unappealing way. Black levels get muddy and detail is just barely better than DVD quality, with improvements noticeable mostly in facial close ups and rarely in medium or long distance shots. Texture is slightly improved and there are mild compression artifacts noticeable from time to time. On top of that, some shots are flat out blurry looking for some reason and the picture tends to jitter in spots. Warner Brothers have provided reference quality transfers for plenty of modern films and beautifully restored high definition releases for many of their catalogue titles, but The Rookie really doesn't look very good at all by Blu-ray standards.