15 Most Corrupt Moments in Dirty Cop Movie History

Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell)

Jimmy Egan is the leader of a group of cops searching for their colleague's killer. While conducting the investigation, these guys seem more coiled up than Scarface on a coke binge. In this disturbing scene, the cops attempt to extract information from a criminal by holding a hot iron to his baby's face. The terror runs high as Jimmy tells a colleague to call in child services to pick up the baby with a disfigured face. Even after Jimmy gets the information and hands the baby back to his mother, Jimmy tells the father that if he ever talks about what happened he'll, "slit your throat, f*ck your wife and kill your kid." Have a nice day, officer.

Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman)

Natalie Portman plays Mathilda, a 12-year old girl who lives down the hall from an assassin named Leon. Unfortunatly for her, a coked cop named Stansfield slays Mathilda's family, including her little brother, in an unhinged moment of drug-fueled madness. But this isn't the end of the pill-popping, mafia-connected lunatic's dirty deeds. Later in the film he threatens Natalie Portman and touches her cheek. God can take care of your other sins, Stansfield, but if you lay a finger on Natalie Portman then the force will be used sir. And by "force" I mean a pack of Star Wars virgins.

The Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel)

Movie cops seem pretty intent on undermining years of the D.A.R.E program. And the remake of Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage looks to pick up where the original left off. In the original, the nameless Lieutenant spirals into disaster, constantly high, gambling outrageously, ignoring crimes, and forcing teenagers into sexual acts. He smells his way into corruption like a dog rubbing his nose into sh*t. Which is to say, he's pretty deep in sh*t. It's a wasteful life in need of a therapist proctologist to pull out whatever self-made crisis is up his behind. One of the most corrupt moments occurs when he is drunk and naked. Just as when a computer file corrupts and won't open, my eyes wouldn't open after seeing Harvey Keitel's full frontal.

Trailer:

Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe)

Sheriff Wydell lost his sanity after the white trash Firefly family murdered his brother. Now he has deep conversations about Elvis Presley, tortures criminals, kills innocents, and puts his evil into words when he tells a mother, "Now you listen to me whore, and you listen good. I am gonna kill every member of your family! I'm gonna hunt them down and I'm gonna skin em' alive! They are going to feel the pain and suffering of every last victim! And when they're on their knees begging me for mercy, all they're gonna get is pain, pain and death!" Oh, insanity, that misunderstood emotion. Insanity, if you're listening right now, let's get together this weekend and see what's going on at the Scientology center. My sixty cats miss you. Preview the killing:

Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret)

I know, I know; a French movie nobody’s ever heard of shouldn't be on this list. But I’ll bet you a baguette that few movie cops have turned out as morally corrupt as Lucien Cordier. Lucien Cordier is the cop of a French African village populated with blacks and a few whites. He is a town joke and everyone humiliates him. He never arrests anyone and looks away from crimes. I assume that curling up into a ball doesn't work for him like it does for me because one day, he turns into a guiltless human exterminator. his crimes incude sawing off the floor of an outhouse so someone falls into it, killing the husband of his mistress, and by the end Lucien is pointing a gun at children. I have no idea what's happening in this clip (I'm American, damn right I only speak American). But it involves foreign guys with mustaches, and nothing says corruption like accents and facial hair.

Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan)

While cop movie fans await the return of Dirty Harry, nowadays Clint Eastwood is busy working as an award-winning director. The film Changeling is based on true events that took place in Los Angeles. A single mom, Christine Collins, returns home to find out that her young son has been kidnapped. The police get involved, and claim that the boy has been found in Iowa. Christine takes one look at the boy and realizes the boy is not her son. The police desire good publicity from the rescue so they hush Christine and have her take the boy home. Christine is baffled and absolutely positive the boy is not her son. The police, aware the boy is not Christine’s son, want to avoid public embarrassment so they cover up the situation by committing Christine to a mental ward. You might call this corruption, but it was normal police procedure in the 1920s. So uhm, yep. I propose we never let the 1920s happen again.

Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles)

Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), a smelly, unshaven, corrupt border-town sheriff is monstrous in his obesity and hatred for Latins. His perfect arrest record is the result of racist hunches and carefully framing suspects to ensure convictions. Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), a righteous Mexican cop, suspects foul play in Quinlan’s bombing investigation. Quinlan, crazy with power, attempts to undermine Vargas by enlisting the help of criminals to implicate Vargas and his wife in drug abuse. Behind closed doors, the audience is left to wonder if Vargas' wife is raped, drugged up, or both. Later, after a subordinate accuses Quinlan of being a killer, Quinlan responds, “Partly. I’m a cop.” Watch him strangle out a hunch:

Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell)

James Cromwell had experience with pigs when he played Babe's owner. Not that I think cops are pigs. Just thought I'd share that. Anyway, he plays Captain Dudley Smith, a man with a face as grandfatherly and trusting as you're going to get on a police squad. There was very little indication that Smith was corrupt since he ordered his men, Exley and White, on separate investigations related to police corruption and drug trafficking. But it was all in pursuit of Smith's own ambition to take out the criminal competition and take charge of the city's drug supply. Here's the end of the movie shootout:

Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon)

Almost everyone in this movie plays something they are not. Matt Damon as Sullivan is a lying corrupt mole in the Boston Police Department. His role on the police force is to make the streets safer...for criminals. Sullivan is smart and sneaky as the crooked mole, covering his tracks and killing loose ends. Also, he takes the double cross to the next level in a triple cross when he kills a mob boss. Sullivan's most sinister moment is when he gives a headshot to another mole who happened to save his life...twice.

Dennis Peck (Richard Gere)

As a manipulative LAPD patrolman, Dennis Peck has enough information on his co-workers to successfully blackmail most of the department. Peck's actions catch the watchful eye of a young Internal Affairs detective. Because of the unwanted attention, Peck starts to agitate the detective by seducing his wife. An easy enough task for Peck, who seems to have all the men in his pocket and women in his lap. Peck even kills a cop, fitting in well with this list. But perhaps his worst crime is squiring 8 or 9 little Peckers to become the pigs of the future. In Peck's defense, he only blackmailed other officers to make all the child support payments. Guess who Andy Garcia is talking about when he asks "who did you have lunch with":

Detective Shaker (Gary Sinise)

Detective Shaker's resume includes kidnapping and scheming, but arguably Mel Gibson's character is a bigger criminal for part of the movie, as he decides to opt out of paying a $2 million ransom for his son. Instead of letting the ransom process take place, Gibson's character declares the ransom money to be used as a bounty on the kidnapper's head. Co-conspirator in murder one-ups kidnapping, so not to be outdone by Gibson, Detective Shaker decides to kill his co-kidnappers and receive the bounty on all of their heads. This is every parent's nightmare:

Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington)

Denzel Washinton plays Alonzo, a bad cop who is responsible for toughening up the good cop. When Alonzo reaches the scene of a crime, he's part participant, part officer. Alonzo shoots 'b*tches,' forces his partner to smoke weed laced with pcp, and kills a friend for money. But perhaps his most damning act as a cop was the fact that he planned the sh*t-pushing demise of his partner a week before training day. Pretty diabolical. Here's Alonzo quarterbacking a crime scene:

Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin)

In this flick, Brolin's character, Detective Trupo, holds nothing sacred in his attempts stop his criminal nemesis, Frank (Denzel Washington). He terrorizes Frank's beauty queen wife as well as his mother, steals all of Frank's emergency cash supply, and draws the envy of Michael Vick when he shoots Frank's prized dog. Check out the film's trailer.

Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden)

In the original Godfather, Captain McCloskey is a hard guy to root for. Not only is he a dirty cop, but he's working for the wrong crime family. He's a constant thorn in the Corleone family's side, protecting a rival family as well as helping to perpretrate an attempted assassination on the big Don himself. That's when things go terribly wrong for this crooked cop, and Michael Corleone takes down both McCluskey and Sollozzo, the man he was protecting. In this Lego reenactment of this classic scene, watch McCluskey's demise as he is taken out by Michael Corleone and falls to his death on the dinner table.

Commander Grant Frost (Ron Rifkin)

Samuel L. Jackson is usually the kind of guy that keeps his cool in movies. But in The Negotiator, he plays an officer that has lost it after being accused of corruption and murder. In an attempt to prove his innocence, he takes several hostages. Makes sense. Fellow colleagues, including Kevin Spacey and Ron Rifkin try and help him out, but in the end it is one of these three back-stabbing baton-wielders that seals his own fate. Let's just say that karma can be a bitch.