Dirty on AllMovie

Cuba Gooding Jr. and Clifton Collins Jr. portray a pair of former gang members who trade in their colors for badges, only to discover that life on the other side of the law isn't much different than life on the streets, in Nightstalker director Chris Fisher's tale of crime and corruption in the highest ranks of the inner-city police force. As anti-gang task force cops Armando Sancho (Collins Jr.) and his partner Salim Adel (Gooding Jr.) make their way through the sweltering concrete jungle of a decaying city, the lines between the law and the lawless grow increasingly blurred. His conscience stirred by his involvement in the murder of an innocent man, Sancho begins weighing the prospect of participating in an Internal Affairs investigation against his loyalty to his amoral partner and best friend Adel. When Sancho and Adel are called in by their division lieutenant (Cole Hauser) and assigned the task of delivering confiscated dope to the henchmen of feared gangster Damien Baine (Wyclef Jean), the deal is sweetened by Baine's offer to cut the pair in on the profits if they agree to bust a gang of newly arrived Canadian drug dealers looking to establish roots in the city. The task is complicated however, by the revelation that not only does the Canadian gang have direct ties to a well-established crime syndicate headed by ruthless Latino crime lord Roland (Robert La Sardo), but that the disgruntled girlfriend of a noted police informant is looking to exact deadly revenge on Adel for a previous wrongdoing as well.