Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
New York cop Frank Serpico blows the whistle on the rampant corruption in the force only to have his comrades turn against him.
Serpico is elevated primarily by Al Pacino's magnetic, deeply committed performance as the idealistic Frank Serpico, which ranks among his finest early work. The story of a lone honest cop fighting systemic police corruption is compelling and grounded in a genuinely remarkable true story, though Sidney Lumet's screenplay follows a fairly linear biographical trajectory without great structural invention. The New York location photography has gritty authenticity but doesn't push cinematographic boundaries. Novelty is solid — the film helped define the corruption-expose subgenre and has a distinctive countercultural flavor with Serpico's hippie outsider persona — but it occupies a well-trodden biographical crime-drama lane. The ending, faithful to reality, is appropriately understated and melancholy but not particularly surprising or resonant beyond its factual weight.