Q & A is the third entry in Sidney Lumet’s loose trilogy about NYPD corruption, and by far the most pessimistic. While Al Pacino and Treat Williams are given an admittedly tough choice in Serpico and Prince of the City, here Timothy Hutton comes to learn that one man can’t make a difference after all.
The ending is as frustrating to the viewers as it is to he hero, because we find out that the character’s hands were tied all along; instead of going over people’s heads and behind their backs, Al Reilly (Hutton) might as well have played ball from the get-go, which would have at least had the consolation that a low fewer people would have died in the process.
In Serpico and Prince of the City, Lumet addressed corruption as a problem that one had to have the balls to attack head-on; in Q & A he seems to have given up, as if saying: "this is the way things are and there is nothing anyone can do about it" — and you know what they say about being part of the problem if you’re not part of the solution.
The film is not without its pleasures, though; not surprising considering the people involved. Nick Nolte is the original Bad Lieutenant (he has two great back-to-back scenes in which he tells a scatological anecdote to the same people he is about to relate his official account of an incident wherein he shot a Puertorrican kid to death. In both instances he has the audience — his and the movie’s — eating out of the palm of his hand; needless to say, the shooting is ruled as self-defense), while Armand Assante is a precursor to Pacino’s Carlo Brigante (both Q & A and Carlito's Way are based on novels by former New York State Supreme Court Justice and author of Puerto Rican descent Edwin Torres).
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