A rookie cop caught in a world of contradictions
A timely yet undercooked action-thriller about police corruption and racism, “Black and Blue” cuts to the chase from its very first, promising sequence. Alicia West (Naomie Harris) jogs through the middle-class streets of a suburban New Orleans neighborhood, only to be stopped and harassed by a pair of suspicious white cops, interrogating her with excessive force for no reason.
It’s not long before the cops realize that “she is a blue,” a part of their team, and let her go; though with palpable arrogance. It’s clear that they would face no consequences, even after illegally slamming one of their own against a fence. Their privilege happens to be standard operating procedure.
It’s a powerful scene, all too real in today’s world where cellphone videos of police brutality continue to go viral. Still, its harrowing vigor is rooted not only in its unspoken relevance but also its cinematic tautness — a virtue director Deon Taylor sadly doesn’t manage to seize throughout. While the premise of Peter A. Dowling’s screenplay is ripe with potential and the ensemble — led by an emotionally and physically commanding Harris and Tyrese Gibson, every bit her match in the role of a reluctant ally — is impressively in sync, “Black and Blue” feels imbalanced and overlong, favoring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.
And the premise itself is a bit too closely matched with Antoine Fuqua’s far more effective “Training Day.” Still, Dowling and Taylor deserve some credit for trading Ethan Hawke’s young, idealistic but inexperienced white male cop for a woman of color, navigating all the contradictory odds stacked against her. “Black and Blue” is at its strongest when it inspects West’s multilayered intersectionality also teased in the title: a newbie black female cop in stereotypically masculine shoes, not entirely embraced by the diverse community she serves (“She is one of them now,” the neighborhood thinks) and stuck in the midst of a well-oiled machine of white-enabled corruption that also holds peopleof-color cops hostage. But the machinations of this avenue go somewhat underexplored, once West finds herself on the run after witnessing (and capturing on her bodycam) the homicide of a young black man by police forces.
West learns quickly that she can’t really trust anyone while plotting her escape from fellow officers who put the blame on her. With even her partner Kevin (Reid Scott) bearing traces of ambiguity, she turns for refuge to Mouse (Gibson), a convenience store owner who wants no part in this escalating crime maze, but lends West a vital helping hand all the same, acting as an intermediary between West and a rightfully angry community about to turn its back on her.
It’s the quietly played scenes that prove most memorable. In one, a young black boy, convinced of West’s guilt, points a gun toward her. Through a pair of others, the uptight but fairminded Missy (Nafessa Williams) confronts her childhood friend West with her long-standing grudges. In a subtle detail, an entitled cop walks away with free coffee and snacks from Mouse’s modest shop.
If only Taylor’s film on the whole had been closer in purpose to the elements at which those scenes succeed. Instead, “Black and Blue” registers as a standard-issue cop thriller with merely fleeting insights on the racial and social issues it aims to dismantle. Despite the efforts of a compulsively watchable Harris, Taylor’s fast-paced mode misses out on a real opportunity amid all the noise, one that could have touched upon a nerve in a deeper and more urgent sense.