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Homicide detectives Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) and Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy) were taken off the case of Robert Randolph in favor of the FBI. The FBI fumbles the arrest. With mounting racial resentment, the mayor orders the cops to take him alive. Gold stumbles onto a murder of an old Jewish grandmother who ran a store in a black neighborhood. The rumor is that she kept a fortune in the basement. The Jewish family uses their political influence to get Gold as the investigator. Gold is frustrated at losing the Randolph case. He's also not a proud Jew and dismisses this case which would test his Jewish ethnicity.

It's David Mamet writing and directing. The dialogue has his mannered style. It's hard-boiled. The visual style is stark. Some of it is off-putting. He's hitting the Jew card very hard right from the start. It's unnecessary. The central concept is intriguing. However, little things keep annoying me. Gold's gun gets taken and fired by a prisoner but there is no investigation afterwards. It shouldn't be up to Gold. There is supposedly a gunman across the way but they don't close the curtains. There are little problems all the way to the end. The most problematic is that Gold's switch feels too abrupt. In fact, I figured he's lying to them to pump for information. In general, the movie doesn't feel natural. There is an intriguing idea but I can't completely buy it.

Bobby Gold, a jewish homicide detective involved in tracking down a cop killer, stumbles onto the shooting of an elderly jewish lady. Although starting only very reluctantly, he gets drawn deeper and deeper into this second case, eventually getting involved with a militant pro-Israel group which causes him to question his own identity as a Jew. This naturally leads to neglect of the first case. Bad things happen as a result.

If you like Mamet films, then you'll certainly enjoy this one. As is typical, his tight dialogue creates wonderful tensions with a minimum of words and the acting is excellent. Unfortunately, the movie fails to live up to its promise. Part of the blame is in a relatively weak finale and a conclusion which goes by so fast you'll miss it if you blink. The real problem, however, is that we never develop any intimacy with the human relationships and personal conflicts which should be the heart of the movie but instead just end up providing support for the actual events taking place. We should be leaving the theater with the story playing over and over in our minds for some time to come, but instead we leave simply having been entertained and enthralled for the duration of the film. Not a bad thing, but not as good as it could have been.

Jewish cop Mantegna is about to blow open a big case when he accidentally becomes embroiled in the case of a Jewish corner shop owner who is murdered. Initially disinterested and keen to sort the big crime, he slowly becomes obsessed with the second case when the motives for the killing become more complex.

A great script from Mamet and a fine turn from Mantegna pull you deeply into the anti semite / zionist underbelly of society. Mantegna is great as a man on the horns of a dilemma between his loyalties to the police and his Jewish background and those he wishes to help. The film is also all the more suspenseful as neither side as shown as necessarily having right on their side.

I saw this film on video when it came out, and have published two reviews about it elsewhere over the years. Having read all the other reviews of it on this site I can say only that I am astounded both that anyone should think the ending is weak, and that no one seems really to understand it at all. Though Mamet is a Jew, and may have written this with a deliberately Jewish theme, this is a film that is ultimately not about Jews at all.

There are two distinct strands to "Homicide", and they come together at the end. Detective Robert Gold is on the trail of a black gangster who has not simply blood but police blood on his hands. In addition to tracking down this guy he is given the task of looking into what appears to be an attack on an influential Jewish family. Gold resents this not because they are Jews but because he has a more important task at hand, and doesn't like people higher up the food chain pulling wires to curry favour at his expense - as he sees it.

However, this alleged attack is quickly linked in his mind as in other people's with the murder of a lowly, elderly shopkeeper who as well as being Jewish has a semi-secret past. When he finds a piece of paper on a rooftop, a piece of paper with a strange word written on it, he becomes convinced there is a conspiracy at work, and without realising it, becomes drawn into an entirely different conspiracy himself.

Robert Gold is first and foremost a police officer, a specialist hostage negotiator, he realises at the end of the film that this rather than his ethnic or lapsed religious identity is what defines him, and that he has betrayed his own kind. Alas, he is not the only one, because the man he is hunting has been betrayed after a fashion, by his own mother. And when Gold learns the prosaic truth about the murder of the shopkeeper and the true significance of that piece of paper, he realises the extent of his own folly.

Truly a masterpiece.

One of two subplots of the movie is an allegory on the identity crisis of American Jewish people. While their hearts beat in line with Israel, yet American Jews also identify themselves more with the American values. This movie came out after highly sensational Palestinian resistance movements in the occupied territories when the different approaches between the American Jews and the Israeli Jews became more visible. So, this subplot actually describes the values of an ordinary American Jew who wants to fight against anti-semitism and proudly displays his/her Jewishness, but doesn't want to go against the rule of law and has to learn Hebrew. And unfortunately, he fails to be a part of both groups in the end.

Give me Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy as partners and I'll guarantee that there will be a movie worth watching. Macy has been moving up the chain, and is brilliant here.

The whole issue of Jewish persecution is woven in the story, and Mantegna is conflicted because he is Jewish, but obviously not a practicing one. As things go, his Jewishness is challenged by the investigation. "You say you are a Jew, and you can't read Hebrew. What are you then?" He is finally confronted with the reality of hate and his role as a cop takes second place to his Jewishness.

It is about realizing that he is nowhere until he finds out who he really is. The language of the police is raw and brings everything out into the open. Detective Gold (Mantegna) doesn't find himself at the end of the film. He has a ways to go, but now he has a direction.

Here's a superb dramatic thriller with a very realistic focus on issues like racism, cultural and religious intolerance, and the raw side of being a policeman.

In "Homicide" Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a detective over so many pressures, already on the run trying to find a cop killer (Ving Rhames) when he's called to take over a homicide case, the murder of a Jewish lady in what appears to be a robbery in her shop in a poor neighborhood. Since he was the first detective at the crime scene and the one who reported the incident, he's told by his bosses to forget about the other case and keep working on this one; besides these facts he's also Jewish but a non practicant one. As one of those strange twists of fate, the reluctant Bobby will confront himself in his own way of thinking about his religion which he always neglected for seeing himself as part of something weak; and he also enters in conflict with his self and his views of his work during the course of both investigations, which affects his whole way of seeing things how they really are.

Writer and director David Mamet manages to skillfully pull the strings of so many backgrounds and worlds without downplaying situations or disappointing the viewers. Everything works in a perfect tense mood; the pieces are well connected and the ability of surprising the audience is incredibly well done but it only works if the viewers fully understand the movie's premise and the real message behind the case rather than only paying attention to the investigations and the action scenes. One of my favorite scenes is the one where Bobby meets a Rabbi who fears more of his badge than his gun, and he reveals what Bobby really is, in being born as Jew but who can't read words in Hebrew; the turning point for the detective to see what he really is.

Mantegna comes with one of his best performances as the hard working detective who at the end of the film realizes how insignificant his instincts were, since he end up betrayed by himself for not seeing that the whole missing piece in this crime puzzle was already in front of him. Also here with a great performance is William H. Macy, playing Mantegna's tough partner. There's so much to be said about "Homicide" but it's better not or I'll spoil the amazing surprises this movie has. 10/10

Good people become bad in a group. They lose their vision when it is subverted by the group vision. You see this in government. You see it in religion. You see it in this film. Gold knows what is right. He is offended by a black city official's anti-semitism. He is appalled by the Nazi atrocities against Jews. He wants to help, only to be betrayed by Jews who hold their cause above their humanity. Unto yourself be true.

I'm a HUGE fan of Mamet. In fact, I think he is the best and most important living playwright today. So lately I have decided to watch all the movies that he has had a part in writing.

Knew nothing about this flick. Seemed to get good reviews. Well is it good?

Yes, but with a caveat. There is something I have noticed about just about everything Mamet writes. There is a tempo and way of writing that is far better on stage than film.

Characters tend to repeat themselves over and over in certain scenes. And the people they are talking to often also repeat the same words. So think of "I'm not feeling good. I'm not feeling good. You're not feeling good. I'm not feeling good." That sort of thing. Only Mamet does it. Never seen another artist do this.

It works better in the theatre than on film.

Anyway, the movie is a bit convoluted and considering the tiny number of reviews here for a film made in 1991, it must have had a limited audience, likely because of the subject matter.

It's slow in its exposition so be aware that you will actually have to concentrate.

I have deliberated whether to give it a 6 or a 7. From my point of view it should be somewhere around 6.5, but I think that a score of 7 would be to high for it.

The good about 'Homicide' is the story and the fine act. I always found Joe Mantegna to be a good actor, playing smart, talkative characters. The plot is nice (though have some flaws).

The main problem of the movie, in my opinion, is the slow pace. It takes about an hour till things start rolling. Its' pace and the twist at the end reminded me of Francis Ford Coppolas' 'The Conversation'. But its' shorter, and not as satisfying as the latter.

There's a scene in Homicide when a police detective uses the phone in the library of a moneyed Jewish doctor who's grumbled about shots being fired on the roof. The detective begrudges being pulled off a high-profile drug bust because the influential doctor has asked for him. If we had the same amount of time and space to contemplate what we say as it does to write it, we'd all sound like writers. And standing at the phone, the detective lets loose a rigidly interlaced, giftedly prearranged, impeccably performed river of four-letter vulgarities and anti-Semitic comments. Only Mamet could write, and maybe only his then favorite actor Mantegna could play, this dialogue so frankly and persuasively, and yet with such spoken fluency that it has the autonomy of ad-libbing. Then the cop turns around...and he sees that he's not alone in the room. The doctor's daughter, in one of Rebecca Pidgeon's strongest, and smallest, performances, has heard every coarse, vinegary word. She knows something we also know: This cop's Jewish himself. And because she heard him, she compels him to face what he's actually saying.

Set in a nameless, menacing city that's all antiquated storefronts and squat apartment buildings, this low-key but complex web of enigma and suspicion reminiscent of the dialogue-driven narratives of classic Hollywood, is about a man awakening to himself. As the story begins, Detective Bobby Gold, the Mantegna character, is a cop who places his job first, his individual selfhood last. He does not think much about being Jewish. When he gets in a fix with a black superior who calls him a kike, he's all set to come to blows, but we intuit that his resentment develops more out of departmental enmity than an individual feeling of offense. Throughout the movie, Mamet's characters exercise the most candid street language in their ethnic and licentious back-and-forth, as if somehow getting the spite open to the elements is a step forward.

Gold's fuming about the doctor because the murder of the doctor's mother was the occasion of Gold being pulled off the big drug case. The mother, an obstinate old lady, ran a cornerstore in a black ghetto. She didn't need the money, but she declined to move, and she's shot dead in a robbery. Bobby, speeding toward the drug bust with his partner, comes across the scene of the crime by chance. "I'm not here. You didn't see me." But the old woman's son, who has sway downtown, wants him assigned to the case. Because Gold's Jewish, the doctor thinks, he'll truly be concerned. The doctor has the wrong man. What Mamet's having a go at here, I feel, is uniting the composition of a thriller with the gist of an identity transformation. The two cases get all mishmashed throughout, the black dealer on the run, the murdered old lady, and, from a theoretical angle, Bobby's not going to be able to solve who did anything until he solves who he is.

Mamet owns the copyright on oblique, repetitive dialogue steeped in pathos, and this third directorial effort, a great example of a film whose bare-bones VHS and DVD releases go out of print and are salvaged by the relatively recent cinema aficionado DVD collective distributions, namely Criterion, hisses with liveliness and kick, and with offhand colloquial dialogue by Mamet, who takes down-to-earth dialectic design and abridges them into a form of hardened, straight-thinking verse. He's a filmmaker with a lucid awareness of how he wants to advance. He applies the rudiments of time-honored standards, the con game, the mistaken identity, the personal crisis, the cop picture, as scaffold for movies that ask questions like: Who's real? Who can you trust? What do people truly want? Here he has more than a few of his favorite actors, who've made their bones in Mamet stage productions: Mantegna, the now veteran Macy, Jack Wallace, the intriguing character actor/magician Ricky Jay.

I must concede that once again with Mamet's work, I get the impression that the actors are so tied down to the stringent verbatim requirements of delivering his dialogue that they can't entirely let go, be spontaneous, but force a repetitious of something that must be just so. But nevertheless, they seem to genuinely listen to each other and respond, to have shaped around Mamet's steel architecture. After all, the emotional thread is there, and it's strong. A consistent yarn in Mamet's film work is his intellectual use of editing, combining one shot to the next to elicit a line of reasoning, so we make clear sense of the emotions extracted by his story. We feel it even before Gold, or we, realize his relationship to the significant situation, his stakes in it, his fears and desires, and most of all, his challenges. He and all his partners are guys with contour haircuts who smoke cigarettes like they require them, not a cast of weather-beaten teen coverboys. They're middle-aged, stressed and weary. And Mamet makes them clear from their present actions. We get the impression that Bobby Gold is not in harmony with his Jewish identity as, like many of his partners, he has let the job replace the person. Gold has become so case-hardened, he doesn't even know how he sounds, until he hears himself through that woman.

Mamet's dialogue may be extremely mannered and lyrical, but it still serves the story the right way: It evokes, not decides, the reading of a scene, calls up the imagination to give a minimal context upon which the actor establishes character. Evocation, imagination, minimalism, character: Right up the alley of every good writer in every medium it concerns.

A Jewish homicide detective (Joe Mantegna, who is not Jewish) investigates a seemingly minor murder and falls in with a Zionist group as a result.

I can't say I have seen all of David Mamet's films, but I have seen enough to know that he is an excellent writer of dialogue. He is a solid director, too, but it is the dialogue that sets his films apart. And this is no exception, going between a good cop story and a much deeper exploration of what it means to be Jewish. (What is the meaning of the Esther scene? I don't know.) What does it mean to be Jewish? But really, what does it mean to be anything? I can't really identify, because I am a great many different ethnicities and feel no allegiance to any one or feel that one is "who I am". Can a bloodline really define who a person is?

As a big fan of David Mamet's films and plays, especially his first film House of Games that also starred Joe Mantegna, I was expecting great things from this film. Instead, I found myself annoyed by the film's superficiality and lack of credibility. Racial slurs are thrown about without any feeling or meaning behind them, in the hopes of setting up a racial tension that for me never materialized. Identity is totally reevaluated and men become "heroes" for no apparent reason. Because of his oaths taken as a cop, the lead character adamantly refuses to perform one relatively small action that would harm no one and could possibly save lives, and yet performs another action which is very violent and VERY illegal, but then still refuses the minor action. In addition, a highly unbelievable subplot involving a man who has killed his family is introduced just for the sake of a plot point that was all but advertised with skywriting, and the cop's reaction to that occurrence stretch credulity way beyond all reasonable limits. Needless to say, after expecting another exciting thriller from David Mamet, I was extremely disappointed to say the least. 3 out of 10.

Some David Mamet films have incredible notoriety amongst the literate set (Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, House of Games). His 2 Oscar noms (Wag the Dog, The Verdict) as well as his non-nominated script for The Untouchables have him firmly established with Hollywood's power base as well.

For my money, the oft-overlooked Homicide is a true Mamet gem--startling in its genius.

Put simply, Homicide is a revealing look at a man's journey into himself. Many will be distracted by the subject matter and tune out, but try to hang on.

Joe Mantegna's Bobby Gold is a tough cop who denies his Jewish lineage, until a low priority murder investigation into an aged Holocast survivor forces him to re-evaluate his entire existence. The resulting destruction of the man is cruel and never-ending,…and brilliant.

William H. Macy, an until-now bit player, gets a well-deserved promotion to #2 man among the strong supporting cast as Gold's partner and sounding board.

The intricacies of the plot, the subtleties of the subtext, as well as the perfunctory Mamet attention to detail may mean a second, or third look is necessary for the viewer to get straight with what's going on------- but take the time, if you can, it just keeps getting better and better.

This is said at least a few times if not more by the lead character Detective Bob Gold of Homicide, and this I might call it a striving seems to be his problem in the film. Since we're taking Jews here, it seems as though he either forgot or never heard or should've taken more to heart one of the great axioms by a Jew, Groucho Marx, when he said "I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."

To me that's what Mamet is after here, as even though he doesn't neglect a narrative or the conflict for the detective between the two cases before him, the Big One for what seems to be more like the kind of case one saw in Police procedurals all the time but on a more realistically mounted scale or the seemingly minor shooting of an old Jewish grocery store owner who happened to be running guns for a time and had more or less a super closed-off but powerful sect of Jews with guns (and, rightly so, fighting anti-semites and Nazis where they might me), this is a character study ultimately about this man and the problem of being a "part" of something.

Mamet doesn't wrestle with or confront how so many many many cops are racist as are so many corresponding limbs of law enforcement and justice - and despite what is said, the majority of people, whatever race or ethnicity, look at Jews as *white* even if/when a name like Gold comes up - but at the same time Mamet also doesn't shy away from showing cops to be super hard-headed assholes and, actually, anti-semitism is not something that would be uncommon in a world where Black men can have some measure of equal footing, if not in some cases more power, and the vast majority of whites are Irish (and here I go stereotyping, but what're you gonna do). The Cop as a Club part is pretty clear and the conflicts in the drama are minor and major, ie will Bob be pushed into going into the evidence locker to get that list for Ricky Jay and those guys, and will he be there to back up his fast-talking but decent hearted buddy (William H Macy in a solid role), yet what impresses me more is that Mamet didn't shy from Jews being their own kind of exclusionary group - to, specifically, another Jew.

This is more personal for me as it's something I've seen and dealt with in my life as someone raised Reform - and guess what, not only can I count on one hand in the last decade I've worn a Yarmulke but bacon and lobster are reasons to keep on living - and as my name and look isn't outwardly Jewish it rarely comes up if ever.... except when I was younger and it did, and while I won't go into a long story I've experienced anti-semitism (and the "K" word) more than once.

So, how the world of Orthodox or even Conservative Jews, the metaphorical (or is it literal) umbilical cord tied to Israel, how symbols are viewed (that one guy in the library is a terrifically written and subtly played scene) and not seeming to be Jewish enough because one can't make out Hebrew words on a page, that all rings true and authentic and Mamet walks this very fine line as a storyteller using Jews as people who are very powerful and yet greatly oppressed at once, that the fight against Anti-Semites and Nazis who use rats as propaganda on fliers must be stopped... but does one lose one's individuality in the process?

Does the power come from defense? Maybe. But it doesn't make them any less of a club or exclusionary or look at Bob as not *quite* one of them when he wants to try to get closer to their world - another great scene in this vein comes when he's on the phone with his cop friend blabbing in the Jewish house he's doing police work in about how awful the place and people are... and Rebecca Pigeon is right there in a cringe reveal that I'm still feeling as I write this review. I think what this all boils down to is that this a sharp and incisive character study with some beats that, at least at this time in Mamet's life and political outlook, let the audience figure out where they may or may not stand.

I's a morality play with almost as many F-words as Glengarry Glen Ross, at least in the first half, it asks more questions questions it could hope to answer, it ends with a helluva anti-climax (or even a series of them), and he has Roger Deakins to make this dark existential reckoning have depth and shadow and to never feel ripped out of a specific place and time.

Last but not least, Ving Rhames shows up (near the end) and almost manages to steal the movie away. What an actor!