Ray Liotta is Riveting as a Maniac Cop in the Eerily Prescient 1992 Thriller Unlawful Entry
Ray Liotta specialized in playing wild-eyed sociopaths and police officers. Unfortunately there is an awful lot of overlap between the two. That made Liotta perfect for the role of a psychotic cop who will do anything to be with the woman he’s obsessed with in 1992’s Unlawful Entry.
The movie has aged beautifully because it forthrightly explores issues that will sadly always be relevant and timely: police brutality, racism, toxic masculinity, societal iniquities, gun control, sex work and sexual violence.
The modest box office hit was released just a few months after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King but it feels like it could be ripped from today’s headlines as well as yesterday’s.
At the time of its release, Unlawful Entry was received as one of the best Fatal Attraction knock-offs. It belongs to the opportunistic sub-genre of paranoid thrillers that flourished in the wake of Fatal Attraction’s zeitgeist-capturing success about evil outsiders entering the lives of wholesome families with an eye towards destroying them.
Fatal Attraction has aged badly, largely due to its vitriolic hatred of women while Unlawful Entry feels unexpectedly contemporary; it’s an unmistakable offspring of Fatal Attraction that’s better than the 1987 surprise smash that started it all.
That’s largely due to a terrifying performance by Liotta as Officer Pete Davis, a corrupt and unwell cop who enters the lives of yuppie couple Michael (Kurt Russell) and Karen (Madeline Stowe) when a burglar breaks into their home and holds a knife to the wife’s throat.
The officer with the icy blue eyes and air of ineffable sadness at first cuts a suspiciously friendly figure. With a deeply sinister semi-secret agenda, Officer Pete wiggles his way into the couple’s lives.
He sets up a security system for them he conveniently knows the password to and takes the husband on a ride along where they run into the man behind the home invasion.
A wild-eyed officer Pete offers Michael an opportunity to viciously beat the man who held his wife at knifepoint but he understandably declines on the basis of not being a sicko who gets off on inflicting pain.
Officer Pete has no such reservations, so he delivers a beatdown on the poor criminal himself. Michael is freaked out and doesn’t want anything more to do with a more evil and psychotic than usual police officer, particularly once it becomes apparent that he’s not only infatuated but obsessed with his wife and will do anything to be with her, up to and including murdering and kidnapping her husband.
Goodfellas made such an indelible impression on me that it’s more than a little distracting hearing Ray Liotta terrorize a woman named Karen. Before Karen became ubiquitous shorthand for a racist, entitled white woman who would like to speak to the manager Liotta owned the word as the name of a woman he is VERY angry with, in part because of excessive cocaine consumption.
When Officer Pete crashes a soiree at a nightclub Michael is opening he tells him in no uncertain terms that he is not welcome at his home or anywhere else he or his wife might be.
The corrupt cop takes it poorly and begins methodically destroying Michael’s life by ruining his credit and framing him for cocaine possession with intent to sell.
At some point the mask of sanity slips and Officer Pete reveals himself to be a sick predator who will stop at nothing to achieve his ends.
Russell is cast against type as a milquetoast husband who looks on helplessly while his wife is threatened. The beloved action icon does not exude meekness organically so the movie Poindexters him up with glasses and a fancy wardrobe.
Russell’s macho essence complicates the film’s exploration of fragile and toxic masculinity. Not being able to protect his wife in a time of crisis makes our hero feel like less of a man and less of a husband but Russell plays the character’s impotence in the face of danger as a temporary moment of weakness and indecision rather than a mark of extreme cowardice.
Unlawful Entry is a staunch believer in the maxim, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s impressively devoid of exposition. It’s rare to see a mainstream, extremely commercial genre movie with this much respect for its audience’s intelligence and judgment.
A lesser film would feel the need to tell us EVERYTHING about Liotta’s villain but Unlawful Entry tells us NOTHING and he is scarier for being fundamentally unknowable.
There’s a great scene where Michael seeks out Pete’s longtime partner Officer Roy Cole (Roger E. Mosley) for help. The curmudgeonly older man is at first unsympathetic but eventually lets him in.
We don’t see what happens after that. We don’t need to. Unlawful Entry is stronger for not having a scene that artlessly unpacks its unforgettable bad guy’s history. We don’t need to know that his daddy drank too much and his mother was unfaithful and that he started stalking women while he was in high school.
Officer Roy Cole’s body language, facial expressions and inflections tell us all that we need to know about Liotta’s maniac cop. It tells us that he’s dangerous and mentally ill, filled with a combustible combination of hatred and lust towards beautiful women and contemptuous of all laws, moral, legal and otherwise.
We can tell from the way Roy treats his partner that he knows all too well that he is deeply unwell and has the kind of problems with women that destroy lives. But Roy is also cognizant that he is a black police officer in Los Angeles in the early 1990s so chances are good he’ll have to put up with a whole lot of bullshit no matter who his partner is.
Unlawful Entry director Jonathan Kaplan began his career in the Roger Corman factory, cranking out cheapies like Night School Nurses and The Student Teachers before graduating to classy fare like 1983’s Heart Like a Wheel and 1987’s The Accused, which won an Oscar for star Jodie Foster.
My favorite anecdote about Kaplan is that he was hired to direct the truck movie White Line Fever by Peter Guber because he had directed Truck Turner, a blaxploitation movie Guber incorrectly assumed was a truck movie because of its title.
Kaplan brings a sense of b-movie craft and economy to Unlawful Entry, creating an atmospheric thriller rooted in the complicated sociopolitical realities of Los Angeles in the early 90s.
Unlawful Entry is undoubtedly one of the best Fatal Attraction clones of the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s but it is a film deeply and unfortunately inspired by Adrian Lyne’s blockbuster all the same.
That means that it’s problematic as well as incisive. With the exception of Officer Pete, every criminal in the movie is black and while Stowe does a fine job without much to work with her character is unmistakably a damsel in distress.
The cops tell the frightened couple not to get a gun, that firearms in the hands of civilians is a recipe for disaster but the movie still ends with Michael pumping a shit ton of bullets into Officer Pete after he unexpectedly rises from the dead like a law enforcement Jason Voorhees.
Unlawful Entry is so effective and prescient that it asks to be remade. Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace covered similar thematic territory but ironically was nowhere near as effective, in part because it foregrounded issues of race, masculinity and sex in a clumsy, ham-fisted way rather than letting them emerge organically from the material the way Unlawful Entry does.
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