Bullitt

There's a point where the idea of "commitment to the bit" goes from respectable to questionable. The late Paul Reubens refusing to break character when he'd appear as Pee-Wee Herman is excellent commitment. Keanu Reeves going through weeks and weeks of training on how to shoot and reload automatic weapons on the move so he could make his performance in John Wick look more authentic is excellent commitment. Bullitt's commitment to the bit of presenting authenticity in the way police investigations happen is commendable, but unfortunately, it blasts past that tipping point and consumes the movie in tedium. On the plus side of that ledger, Bullitt is human, not a superhero. He isn't a never-ending font of quips and one-liners, he isn't a world-class marksman or a trained fighter, and he isn't some loose-cannon man-on-the-edge cliche. In fact, none of the cop movie cliches are present here. Bullitt is a regular guy, working a case, following up on leads, presenting reports to his CO. That's refreshing after growing up with all the Lethal Weapons and Tango's & Cash's and Die Hards of the world ... but it also means Bullitt, as a character, is dry as a bone. He's not presented as stoic so much as straight-forward. He has no character arc whatsoever, just a straight line through the story. I applaud the realism -- life doesn't work in arcs -- but the problem is, this isn't real life. This is a movie, and I come to be entertained. A guy doing his job like any other isn't entertaining. Similarly, the movie is absolutely committed to showing you the minutiae of a police investigation. Want 3-5 minutes of watching two detectives inventory every item in a steamer trunk? I mean EVERY ITEM, looked at and verbally described. It is exhaustive and exhausting. Another scene like this is in the final chase, when Bullitt it pursuing a guy through an airport. At one point, he loses the suspect, so Bullitt scans the room; we see Bullitt look to the left, cut to a shot of the crowd, then he moves his head to the right a little, another cut to a crowd, another move of the head, and so on. It is a thorough scan of the entire population of this airport terminal. Again, that's how it would really happen, but the commitment to realism sucks all the tension out of the scene. A quick montage of shots of the crowd would get the point across and keep the pace from crashing into a wall. Even the infamous chase scene, as cool as it is in the abstract, is tiresome, as it goes on for TEN MINUTES. Never mind that the chase is geographically impossible or that the way the cars take abuse would leave them a non-functional heap of scrap metal long before ten minutes elapsed, it's just too much of that one thing. That sums up Bullitt nicely: it's too much. Two hours of overly thorough, anally retentive box-checking to present police work as honestly as possible, which stops the movie from ever communicating the stakes in an important way. Technically, it's an accomplishment. Steve McQueen is a good leading man. The car chase scene is kinda fun, and the foot chase through the airport is interesting as well. But the movie's commitment to the bit bloats this movie to the point where it forgets that the point of the movie is to NOT be real; it's to be fun.