Police officer Cristi (Dragos Bucur, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU) is tailing a teenager Victor (Radu Costin) who has been implicated in smoking and supplying pot by his best friend Alex (Alexandru Sabadac); however, Cristi is suspicious about Alex's motives, and he is also unwilling to put a kid away for seven years (or three-and-a-half as his superior suggest) for a law that he believes will soon change. Cristi avoids his captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) who is pushing him to simply run a sting on the teenagers and sort out the case in the statements, and starts trailing Alex. Cristi also presses various overworked and apathetic co-workers into rushing background checks as Anghelache presses him for results. That's really all there is to POLICE, ADJECTIVE, because the film is less about the investigation - which takes up so much of its running time - and more about the limitations that language places on Cristi's ability to function as a policeman and as a human being. In contrast, the same limitations allow his superiors to fulfill the letter of the law without moral quandaries; and it is in the crucial climactic scene that Anghelache demolishes Cristi's very ability to argue against "the law" with the literal definitions of such terms as "conscience," "morality," "law," and - of course - "police." The climactic scene would have made for a compelling and stimulating short film; however, it takes director Corneliu Porumboiu a long time to say little else. Lengthy scenes of bureaucratic drudgery establish nothing most viewers will not have accepted the first time around, while the surveillance scenes establish at length that nothing covert is taking place. More interesting are the scenes with Cristi's office colleague which establish that Cristi's lack of linguistic savvy in effectively discouraging the older, pudgier man's interest in joining Cristi's "foot tennis" team, and the first scene of Cristi at home with his wife in which he expresses an ignorance (perhaps willingly so) of the symbolic language of a pop song that his wife listens to ad nauseum. Porumboiu's objective filming approach often means that - unless we get to read Cristi's reports - we do not learn any of the case's revealing details until we've followed Cristi from his office to another office so that he can talk to another person (and the facts of the case are meaningless anyway).