Timely… but race riots replay runs out of steam
clear but they certainly turn a very blind eye as, very soon, Barry is making more cash than he knows what to do with. At his new home in Arkansas – apparently paid for by the CIA and complete with its own airport – he has it stuffed into suitcases, wardrobes and even buried in the garden.
This is all pretty familiar territory with the likes of Blow (2001), Savages (2012), Sicario (2015) and The Infiltrator (2016) all coming to mind, along – somewhat inevitably – with the popular Netflix series Narcos. Clearly aware of that, Cruise and director Doug Liman join forces to play it slightly for laughs which, given that this Reagan-era tale is tiptoeing towards the labyrinthine tangle that was the Iran-Contra scandal, is probably no bad idea.
The result is an easy old watch that doesn’t stretch Cruise one jot and gives him plenty of opportunity to combine floppy fringe and flashes of pearly whites to familiar effect. But hey, he’s built a career around that and, while this is miles short of his best work, I can’t see it bringing that to a sudden end.
Detroit (15A) arrives here with so much going for it. It’s directed by Kathryn Bigelow, maker of both The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty and still the only woman to win an Oscar for best director. But even more important is its timeliness. This is a film set amid the Detroit race riots of 1967 but it deals with themes that have become daily headline news in Trump-era America – police brutality against black communities, institutional racism and rampant right-wing bigotry.
As a serious Bigelow fan and in touch with my inner liberal, I’d expected to love what I thought would be a hardhitting masterpiece.
But somewhere along the long line (the film lasts almost two-and-a-half hours) it gradually lost me.
At its heart lies the tragic events that took place in the Algiers Motel, where three black teenagers were killed by anti-riot forces including the Detroit police, state police and the National Guard.
Nobody was ever convicted of the murders, although Bigelow doesn’t flinch from blaming the deaths on racist police officers, one of whom has already fatally shot a fleeing looter.
The film is certain to divide opinion but, for me, what goes wrong is an over-slow pace, a rambling storyline that doesn’t make enough sense and the presence of two British actors – Will Poulter and Star Wars star John Boyega – in this most American of stories. The former plays a racist police officer and the latter a morally conflicted private security guard and, while neither does anything particularly wrong, their presence broke my suspension of disbelief, turning a key interrogation scene in a motel hallway from a stand-off of almost unbearable tension into something resembling a nasty improvised acting class. A tough watch either way.
Matthew Bond