Mostly, I’m amazed that movies like Bending the Rules are still made. That its cop is so obviously shady and its lawyer is so annoying and its end boss so predictable—even if the movie tries to surprise you by proffering almost zero clues—is a marvel of cinematic ignorance. Sure, buddy cop movies are still made and renegade cops continue to be a favorite protagonist of the Hollywood machine, but rarely are the nuts and bolts of the genre so evident. That our corrupt police officers are routinely Bostonian with an unbreakable code of honor merely shows the progression we’ve made from the time when our hero was distinguishable from all the other men and women in blue by his wacky floral shirt and the way he waggled his eyebrows at the end of every sentence. It’s so bad that, at one point, the lawyer tells the cop—who is eating a doughnut, of course—that he’s a walking cliche. Read more