YMMV / To Live and Die in L.A.

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Chance is this trope. Is he really despondent and vengeful over Hart's death, or is he using it as an excuse to feed his adrenaline addiction?
  • Masters as well. Some see him as a Magnificent Bastard, a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with Straw Nihilist tendencies, or just a straight bad guy.
• Awesome Music: The score by Wang Chung, especially the theme song and "City of Angels", is pure 80s goodness.
• Broken Base: The jury is still out whether or not this movie is better than The French Connection or simply one of William Friedkin's best. Or just an average movie from a director with his glory days behind him but a long way still to go before hitting rock bottom.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: It's pretty obvious it's Feds on Chance and Vukovich backs by the time they hit Down L.A. Drain during the car chase sequence, as nobody else would have that kind of manpower and resources. Especially not after two lousy thieves.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Masters and Chance; the former certainly enjoys patting down the latter shortly before he tells him "You're beautiful." Chance later returns the favor, presumably sarcastically, but it's hard to be sure.
  Masters: Is this my package?
• It Was His Sled: It's difficult to find anyone who's heard of this movie without them knowing of Chance's death roughly fifteen minutes before the end.
• Les Yay: Serena and Bianca have a bit of an unspoken relationship throughout the movie, culminating in a Thelma & Louise moment at the very end. But before that, they actually have sex. And Masters knows.
• Moral Event Horizon: In the second half of the movie, Chance himself crosses this when he robs Thomas Ling, the FBI agent. And if that wasn't enough, he doesn't bat an eyelash about it after Ling was accidentally shot by the men who were trying to rescue him.
• Nightmare Fuel: The deaths of Jimmy Hart and Chance himself at the end. Arguably the most accurate depictions of a shotgun blast to the head ever caught on film. And it works.
• Older Than They Think: To modern audiences, it can seem like a litany of every '80s and '90s cop movie trope/cliche eventually parodied in Last Action Hero and the McBain movies-within-the-show on The Simpsons - from the cop days from retirement who gets killed on the job to the totally tubular LA setting to the exact line (not uttered in Lethal Weapon), "I'm getting too old for this shit." Except when you look closer, it turns out this movie predates Trope Codifier Lethal Weapon (1987) by two years and would have been well into production around the same time Miami Vice debuted. To make it even weirder, pretty much all the things it "check-lists" are in fact Unbuilt Tropes, as the film is a deconstruction of various ideas that later became genre staples played straight.
• Retroactive Recognition: Gary Cole makes his uncredited film debut as the man chased by Richard Chance.
• Signature Scene: The against-the-traffic freeway chase.
• Spiritual Successor: This very much feels like a Miami Vice film. So much that there was a story that Michael Mann sued William Friedkin for plagiarism.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Especially considering it was a throwback to grim and gritty 70s-era crime films during a decade when feel-good, Black-and-White Morality action films were the order of the day.
• Vindicated by History: When first released, the film was treated with "meh" reviews and vanished at the box office. It has since been reevaluated, with some saying it is as good as, if not better, than The French Connection.

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