Al Reilly (Timothy Hutton) is the son of a New York cop and a former cop himself.  Having put himself through law school, Reilly is now an assistant district attorney.  When Reilly is assigned the case of Mike Brennan (Nick Nolte), a popular detective who claims to have killed a Puerto Rican drug dealer in self-defense, everyone assumes that Al will come down on the side of Brennan.  Instead, Al discovers that Brennan is corrupt and that the shooting is connected to a drug lord named Bobby Texador (Armand Assante).  Bobby just happens to be married to Nancy (Jenny Lumet), who is Al’s ex-girlfriend.

Nobody was better at capturing the hustle and the gritty language of New York City politics than Sidney Lumet and some of the best scenes in Q&A are the ones where characters like Al, Brennan, and even Bobby are just hanging out and being the New Yorkers that they are.  The dialogue in those scenes crackle with cynicism, as everyone knows better than to trust anything that anyone says.  Coming after Serpico and The Prince of the City, this was Lumet’s third film to focus on corruption in the NYPD.  It was a world that Lumet obviously knew well and he brings the eye for detail that a story like this needs to hold our attention.

Unfortunately, the plot of Q&A is often too dependent on melodrama and coincidence.  Asking us to believe that Bobby would just happen to be married to Al’s ex is asking a lot.  As opposed to the documentary feel of Serpico and especially The Prince of the City, Q&A feels like an extended episode of a cop show, with little of the moral ambiguity that Lumet brought to his best films.  Q&A is good but its never as good as it could have been.

As an actress Jenny Lumet doesn’t really have the depth necessary to make Nancy a believable character.  (Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t the only director to miscast his daughter in 1990.)  But the rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, with Luis Guzman, Fyvush Finkel, Lee Richardson, Paul Calderon, Charles S. Dutton, and Patrick O’Neal all turning in good supporting performances.  Of the leads, Hutton is often overshadowed by the more flamboyant performances of Nolte and Assante but, overall, he does a good job of anchoring the film’s story.  Nolte is excellent in the role of Mike Brennan.  It’s just too bad that the film eventually turns him into a standard movie villain.

Sidney Lumet would return to theme of New York political corruption with the underrated Night Falls On Manhattan.