Policeman's Lot

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SEA OF LOVE

Directed by Harold Becker

Screenplay by Richard Price

When did this vast cloud of depression settle over the movies' police force? Possibly when Joseph Wambaugh quit the Los Angeles department and started writing realistic (and highly adaptable) novels about the modern lawman's unhappy lot. In any case, it is now the formula for cop movies: the detective hero is usually divorced, drinking too much and sleeping too little. Often he wonders what it all means -- running around, risking your life and not making any discernible dent in the crime rate.

What saves Frank Keller (Al Pacino) from the depths is wit. He is first seen - as host of a church baseball brunch at which the Yankees have been announced to appear. They do not. What does appear is a squad of New York City's finest, who bust everyone in the place. For Keller had invited baseball fans who also happen to have made the most-wanted list.

The same imaginative spirit animates his pursuit of a serial killer who is stalking womanizers (nice reversal of expectations there). Keller and his partner (John Goodman) place ads in the personal columns of an alternative newspaper and start dating the respondents. Needless to say, the likeliest suspect (Ellen Barkin) is also the best bet to comfort our hero.

Sex and menace do not synergize as hysteria, the way they did in Fatal Attraction. This film is relatively calm. But it is worth taking in because all concerned catch the tone of New York's besieged multitudes. Their weariness is touched with hope, and their hope with irony. Their realism transforms what might have been an item easily overlooked by the moviegoer into something worth collaring. R.S.