There are messy films, and then there’s Cruising—a movie that charges into the late-’70s New York gay leather scene waving a knife, a badge, and absolutely no idea what it wants to say. It’s part crime thriller, part character study, part panic attack about queer sex, and part “Al Pacino tries standing around in a harness while looking conflicted.” Somehow, it manages to be simultaneously exploitative, dull, and weirdly vague, like a PSA made by someone who only half-read their own script.
On paper, it sounds like it should at least be gripping. Body parts are turning up in the Hudson River. A serial killer is targeting gay men in leather and S&M bars. The cops are out of their depth and out of patience. Captain Edelson recruits Steve Burns, a baby-faced patrol officer, to go undercover because he kind of looks like the victims—slim, dark-haired, and apparently willing to trade basic mental health for a shot at promotion. Burns moves into the Village, starts “cruising” the bars, and tries to track down the killer before everyone in a jockstrap ends up in the river.
In a better film, this setup might lead to a tense, morally knotty thriller. In Cruising, it mostly leads to scenes of Pacino wandering through smoky clubs looking like he accidentally walked into someone else’s movie and is too polite to leave.
Pacino’s Steve Burns is supposed to be a straight cop grappling with the impact of immersing himself in a sexual subculture he doesn’t understand. In practice, he spends a lot of time staring at men, sweating, and saying very little. The film flirts with the idea that going undercover awakens something in him—confusion, desire, at least a deeper sense of empathy—but then refuses to commit to any of it. His relationship with his girlfriend Nancy mostly consists of him not telling her anything, her looking worried, and both of them pretending they’re still in a normal movie about boy meets girl instead of “boy meets killer in a harness.”
By the time Burns befriends Ted, his gay neighbor—a playwright with a clingy boyfriend and the patience of a saint—you think, “Ah, here we go: humanity, nuance, maybe even a real emotional connection.” Instead, Ted exists primarily to be a soft, tragic contrast to the leather scene and then end up mutilated so the plot can half-heartedly shove an extra twist at Burns’ soul. When Ted’s murder is brushed off by the cops as a likely domestic spat gone wrong, the film almost stumbles into pointed commentary about institutional indifference. Almost. Then it shrugs and moves on to more clubs.
And that’s the thing about Cruising: it constantly sets up potentially interesting angles—police brutality, internalized homophobia, the blurry line between role-play and violence—then abandons them like last night’s bar tricks. Burns watches Skip Lee, a waiter, get beaten into a confession by cops who clearly enjoy the work far too much. He protests, briefly, that this isn’t what he signed up for. Captain Edelson scolds the officers, and for a moment you think, “Okay, here’s the ethical core of the movie.” Five minutes later it’s back to sweaty dance floors and cryptic killer POV shots. The outrage evaporates in the haze.
The slasher thread is no better. The killer is eventually pinned on Stuart Richards, a gay music student with schizophrenia and a box of letters to his father—because nothing says “nuanced mental health depiction” like turning schizophrenia into a serial killer shorthand. Burns baits him in the park, gets stabbed for his trouble, and then stabs Stuart back so the fingerprints can save the day. Case closed, fingerprints matched, killer caught, everyone please clap.
Except… apparently not? Because Ted turns up dead after Stuart is already in custody. The cops decide Ted’s boyfriend did it. Burns doesn’t argue much. The audience, if they’re still awake, is left wondering whether the film is going for “multiple killers,” “Burns might have done it,” or “we cut 40 minutes out and hoped no one would notice.” This ambiguity could have been powerful in a movie with a stable center. Here, it plays like the editor tripped over the film can and just rolled with it.
Then there’s the final scene, which has launched a thousand arguments and zero satisfying explanations. Burns returns to Nancy, now promoted to detective and apparently done with cruising the Meatpacking District. While he shaves in the bathroom, Nancy tries on his leather gear—jacket, cap, aviator sunglasses—mirroring the killer’s outfit. Burns stares at himself in the mirror. The film cuts, leaving us with… what? Is Burns now the killer? Was he always? Is it symbolism for how the investigation has changed him? Is the leather jacket cursed? Did the script run out of pages?
It doesn’t feel intriguingly open-ended; it feels like the movie just refuses to pick a lane. Instead of a chilling “evil lives on” ending, it’s more like “we couldn’t decide whether we were scared of the killer, gay sex, or both, so we’ll just hint vaguely at everything and roll credits.”
Stylistically, Cruising has moments: the dark, cramped bars, the unnerving score, the sense of New York as a city rotting from the inside. Friedkin knows how to shoot dread. He just doesn’t seem to know what he’s dreading. The leather scene is filmed like an alien planet—full of masks, sweat, and ritualized aggression—but there’s very little in the way of context or perspective. For protestors at the time, it understandably looked like a feature-length “gays are dangerous perverts” reel with a few dead bodies tossed in for variety.
The clumsiest part is that the film keeps trying to have it both ways. It wants the shock value of hardcore club imagery—chains, slings, explicit dancing—without the responsibility of showing that these are real communities with people who exist outside of dimly lit fetish bars. It wants to critique police brutality, but not too hard. It wants to poke at gay panic, but also stoke it for thrills. It wants to be daring, but keeps flinching at its own reflection.
Al Pacino, for his part, seems as confused about what the film is doing as the audience. He’s fully committed in the physical sense—he’s there, in the clubs, in the leather, in the danger—but the character’s inner life is so underwritten and the dub so distancing that you never quite know what Burns is feeling beyond “tired” and “slightly horrified.” When even Pacino later calls your movie “exploitative,” you might want to take a note.
In the end, Cruising isn’t just a problematic movie; it’s a half-baked one. It has the bones of a sharp, unsettling thriller about identity, desire, and violence, but it slaps them together with such sloppy intent that you’re left with a skeleton that can’t stand up on its own. Yes, it’s a time capsule of a vanished New York. Yes, it has some atmospheric power. But as a story—as a coherent argument about anything—it mostly just lurches from murder to murder, gaze to gaze, and finishes by throwing its hands up and asking, “So… who knows?”
If you want to see a film wrestle with queer subculture and serial-killer terror in a thoughtful way, look elsewhere. If you want to see two hours of a movie nervously staring at gay leather bars like they’re portals to hell while pretending it’s solving a case, Cruising is waiting—with open arms, a confused script, and a very shiny pair of handcuffs.
