Having spent an hour or more licking a woman’s feet, you ought to at least look her in the eye afterwards. Not Dave Brown. He doesn’t do etiquette, sexual or otherwise. “You can’t cheat on something you never committed to”, he quips. When a bent cop starts in on his rookie partner about how “everything you learnt at the Academy is bullshit”, you figure what kind of movie you’re in for. If only Rampart delivered any of it.

The film takes its name from the real-life scandal that rocked the Los Angeles Police Department in 1999. Murder, assault, drug abuse, and evidence tampering were among the everyday activities considered the purview of some 70 LAPD cops. Dave Brown is a fictional escapee of that era, still patrolling the streets while others rot in jail. His immunity to all oversight is remarkable. Despite footage of his having assaulted a passer-by in broad daylight, his superiors let him loose on two robbery suspects, who later show up dead. Such freedom – granted in the shadow of the larger scandal and the public’s growing disillusionment – is bewildering and utterly implausible, even for the LAPD.

Brown is plagued by rumours he once killed a sex offender. A potential court case looms large, though no one seems very concerned; fellow officers jokingly baptise him ‘Date Rape’. Seemingly desperate to live up to such a billing, he drags the moniker through a series of lurid encounters, each more desperate than the last. One is a lawyer, who doesn’t work in real estate. He isn’t looking for financing, and takes her home. You wonder what might come of the prosecution sleeping with the accused. In all matters Rampart, the answer is nothing. No one he meets adds to his condition. Not one thinks to alter his course.

The film ponders on until even it grows tired of its solitary trick. Brown is going nowhere. In offering him neither redemption nor destruction, the film settles merely for disinterest. Woody Harrelson spends every scene adjusting his aviators, smoking coolly atop white picket fences. Playing bad cop may lead to the kind of critical acclaim that once alluded his Surfer Dude, but as an omnipresent lead he is surrounded by vacancy. Neither acquaintance, informant nor adversary explain their motivations, if indeed they have any to speak of. Everyone is exactly as they seem, and nothing more. Sigourney Weaver and Steve Buscemi make their appearances, alongside an unrecognisable Ben Foster, and yet you’d struggle to recall their significance not 5 minutes later.

Given a more interesting plot, burdened perhaps with development or emotional shifts, such thin characterisation might have been forgivable. This is not that plot. Trapped at the helm of a dreary slow walk to oblivion, director Oren Moverman experiments with a handheld camera work, hoping to jar the viewer from the deep slumber they’ll have done well to resist. Even a strange, hazy trawl through a seedy sex club fails to elicit much interest. Harrelson remains stubbornly effective throughout, with a psychopathic calm that surely deserved richer storytelling. When his own daughter admonishes him (“You’re a dinosaur. You’re a classic racist, a bigot, a sexist, a womaniser, a chauvinist, a misanthropic homophobe”), two things come to mind. One, that the description makes him sound considerably more interesting than he really is, and two: what such a film might have looked like.