YMMV / L.A. Confidential (1997)

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Sid Hudgens is despicable, especially his setting up Reynolds to blackmail Loew, but the way Dudley double-crosses and then shoots him point-blank? You can't help but feel a little bad for the guy.
• Award Snub:
  • Often held up as one for its Best Picture loss to Titanic (1997) at the Academy Awards.
  • Likewise, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey all failed to even earn nominations in the acting categories (the former two likely due to still being relatively unknown at the time).
  • This film did one-up Titanic by beating it to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.
• Complete Monster:
  • Captain Dudley Smith is a disarmingly friendly policeman whose manner belies his utterly corrupt nature. Aiming to consolidate control of all criminal activity in Los Angeles after the fall of gangster Mickey Cohen leaves a power vacuum behind, Dudley steadily chases away or kills all criminal opposition in the city. When his underling, crooked cop Dick Stensland, attempts to sell stolen heroin behind his back, Dudley has the Nite Owl diner shot up, killing innocent civilians alongside Stensland. Framing a trio of criminals for the crime, knowing their history as rapists will allow him to evade scrutiny, Dudley tries to have them killed while accusing them of resisting arrest. When the arrival of other cops on the scene first undermines his plot, Dudley orchestrates the criminals escaping from captivity, having them killed by Edmund Exley, a young cop trying to do good who looks up to him. Swiftly murdering any officers who discover his criminal empire, when Dudley is nearly exposed, he merely kills off all of his business partners to tie up loose ends and tries to corrupt Edmund into joining him after all of his men are killed in a shootout to restart his organization anew.
  • Pierce Morehouse Patchett is a sleazy businessman trying to take over Los Angeles crime with Dudley Smith. Running Fleur-de-Lis using high-class call girls given surgery to resemble famous actresses, Patchett assists Dudley in eliminating Dick Stensland by having a call girl date Stensland and lure him to the cafe for both to be killed along with four other innocents. Blackmailing politicians and regularly murdering rival criminals, Patchett orders a call girl dating officer Bud White to to seduce the investigating Edmund Exley in the hopes Bud will kill Edmund for he and Dudley to evade any chance of being caught, and casually murders a young actor for overhearing their plans.
• Fridge Brilliance: On the making-of featurette on the DVD, Russell Crowe laments that he only had one scene with Kevin Spacey, before concluding that Bud White doesn't like Jack Vincennes. Naturally, an old-fashioned police officer like Bud would loathe someone like Jack, whom he sees as a self-serving glory hound, while Jack would have little time for Bud, whom he'd dismiss as a thuggish brute. Hence why they only interact once in the whole movie.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Vincennes' scenes with Matt Reynolds are pretty hard to take after it was revealed that Kevin Spacey had a long history of molesting young male actors. Even worse is that a large part of the film which Jack Vincennes is involved in is a subplot about Ron Rifkin's character molesting young actors. In his introduction scene, Vincennes boasts "America isn't ready for the real me!" which aged poorly in light of Spacey's scandal.
  • Bud’s murder of Inez Soto's rapist, an unarmed black man, and Bud trying to frame the situation as “self-defense” by planting a gun next to his corpse is meant to be uncomfortable but given the recent issues of Police Brutality during the 2010s and 2020, it’s even more uncomfortable. Plus the line about the public not caring if black men with records getting killed is also this when you think about the times the police use previous felonies of the victims to justify their murders.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Nice Guys brought Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger together again, and in a story set in Los Angeles to boot!
  • Exley never learned the name of his father's killer but gives him the name "Rollo Tomasi" to give him a personality and therefore someone to blame. In Memento, Guy Pearce's character Leonard is an amnesiac who's forgotten his memory of accidentally killing his wife and creates the fake name "John G" to give himself someone else to blame and hunt down.
• Magnificent Bastard: Captain Dudley Smith is a charming and witty but utterly corrupt police officer. Aiming to take control of all criminal activity after the fall of Mickey Cohen leaves behind a power vacuum, Dudley kills or chases away rival criminal opposition in the city. When his corrupt officer underling Dick Stensland goes behind his back in an attempt to sell stolen heroin, Dudley has Stensland shot in a public diner to mask the killing. Framing a trio of rapist criminals for the massacre, Dudley attempts to have the rapists killed during arrest to avoid them talking. Even when the criminals are instead arrested, Dudley manages to orchestrate their escape to have them killed by well-meaning Lieutenant Edmund Exley. Manipulating the entire police department, when the heroic officers begin closing in on him, Dudley has Edmund photographed sleeping with officer Bud White's girlfriend in an attempt to have Bud kill Edmund and begins murdering his own criminal business partners to tie up loose ends. When Edmund holds him at gunpoint, Dudley faces him with no fear and when Edmund stays his hand, simply tries to talk Edmund into joining him as he restarts his criminal empire, coming within an inch of victory and embodying both the charm and corruption that a police badge can conceal.
• Rooting for the Empire: Dudley Smith. He is evil, but not as depraved as his book counterpart. In fact, most of his victims in his film counterpart are criminals, corrupt cops or other scumbags. Besides this, he doesn't have any really disgusting crimes like rape or infanticide. Evil Is Cool aside, Dudley Smith framing a trio of rapist criminals for the massacre, ordering them killed during the arrest by his associates to make sure they won't talk is an act one can hardly call evil.
• Signature Scene: The movie features a lot of great scenes and cinematography, but Exley's brilliant interrogation of the Nite Owl suspects is the one most likely to stay with viewers.
• Spiritual Successor: To Chinatown. Even though they both have a completely different cast and crew, both are set in Los Angeles, both were made 40 years after the time period in which they are set, and both feature themes of betrayal, corruption of public institutions and officials, and "neo-noir" values. Oh, and both have scores by Jerry Goldsmith.

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