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Lack of good storyline.

Just what I expected

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Jake Martin (Walter Mattau) investigates massacre that took the lives of eight people on a city bus. One of those victims was Jake's partner, Detective Evans, who was supposed to be called in sick. The question is: what was Detective Evans doing on the bus when the shooting occurred? Jake's colleagues: Leo Larsen (Bruce Dern), James Larrimore (Lou Goessett Jr.) help him on the cast leading to various places throughout San Francisco"The Laughing Policeman" is a police procedural film that runs at a slow pace, which made it difficult to follow sometimes especially with the leads the characters have on the case. This bothered me a bit - maybe it has something to do with my generation's attention span? But the slow pace allowed us as viewers to see police procedural of the early 70s. While today's police procedural films (and TV shows) rely on technology to aid on a case, back then it seem that the police will take anything necessary to get the bad guy in; relying on gut feeling. We also get to know about the characters' lives in their police work - how they hate their job while going after the killer. "The Laughing Policeman" is worth watching despite of the slow pacing. The actors who play their roles have done a great job getting the audiences' attention to the scene. The plot will keep you guessing until the end.

Yes this is a slow moving police investigation. After the initial massacre on a SF city bus, that does a great job of pulling the audience in, the action slows considerably.The initial crime scene investigation is both authentic and pathetic. It is a glaring example of poor techniques that were employed by all police departments as recently as the 1980's. In this movie all the detectives were traipsing through the crime scene, smoking cigarettes and touching everything in sight.Though the autopsy scene is long and the actors playing the corpses couldn't quite stay still, the actual autopsy was painfully authentic. Also authentic was the medical care given to the only living bus passenger. This was way before ET and ER and dare I say probably influenced both.The characters and the themes the detectives deal with mirror the change and turmoil that defined the 1970's. The seedy city that has been romanticized recently is well represented in this film: promiscuous gays, pimps and prostitutes, kinky sex all out in the public.Those things are the real strengths of the film. The murderer himself is a let down as is investigation that leads to him. A rich man kills a detective to prevent that detective from fingering him as the murderer of the rich man's wife. He kills everybody on the bus as cover. Oh please. If he is that ruthless and smart to do that, than he is not going to hold onto the gun, or get spooked by some detective who shows up with an old photo. The climactic scene on the bus, when the killer gets shot while trying to wipe out another detective on another city bus is so contrived as to be laughable (perhaps how they came up with the tile).Overall, enjoyable as a period piece and character study.

I caught this on a movie channel a couple weeks ago and knew that it was supposed to be pretty good, Dern plays the new partner of the cop whose partner is killed, and as the plot reveals it is connected to an old case his old partner was reinvestagating. It has a few good and unexpected twist that was highly enjoyable and a climatic end that was well executed.The very last scene had me cracking up when the cop brings the guy in that looks like the boxer and Walter Matthau tells him that's 'it's a bit too late for that' and walks off.overall 8/10.

Of the books in the Martin Beck series, this and Roseanna are the best at describing a lengthy police investigation, one in which it seems as if no progress is being made. As I recall, the killer was an important businessman trying to cover up the long ago, extremely brutal murder of a young woman. The cop who was killed on the bus had taken up the case in what today we call 'a cold case file.' This version repeats a bit of this,but from there it veers off into San Francisco, homosexuals, a laughing Bruce Dern ~~in the book, 'The Laughing Policeman' is the title of an ancient phonograph record~~, and the bonding between two detectives, a theme worn to death in later movies.Matthau is properly rumpled, grumpy and unsmiling, but he is not Beck, who is one of the finest characters created in modern detective fiction. As one reviewer notes, the film is a pale "Bullitt' and it is McQueen who could have given us the definitive Beck.The solving of the case in the book was large part teamwork, which we don't see here, and a small part luck. The case hinged on the misidentification of a car....this would be too dull unless it were done on Law and Order....and the work it took to track down the owner years later.The film is gritty and makes us work to connect the dots, but it does not hold a candle to the book. Oddly James Ellroy used the same massacre idea in LA Confidential and when time came to make the film version, Curtis Hanson got it right.