Political fury elevates Cut Throat City
Cut Throat City (R16, 123 mins) Directed by RZA Reviewed by
It’s been 15 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, washing away any last illusions North America might have had about systemic inequality and the apartheid-in-all-but-name that still blights its inner-cities, more than any ‘‘outside threat’’ ever will.
Setting a heist-gone-wrong yarn in the aftermath of those terrible days is an idea so good, I’m only surprised nobody has landed on something similar before.
As directed by TheWuTang Clan’s RZA – finally breaking out of the musician-turned-director cliches and starting to look like a born film-maker – with writer
P G Cuschieri’s overstuffed script embracing and then overturning every cliche of the genre at will, Cut Throat City sure ain’t perfect, nor will it maybe ever find the audience it deserves.
But, if I had to choose whether to watch this again tonight, or anything Guy Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn and their imitators have put out recently, I’d pick Cut Throat City every time.
When the heist goes wrong, the gang, led by Shameik Moore
( Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse) find themselves hiding from the ferocious ‘‘Cousin’’ Bass
(T.I., Dolemite Is My Name).
And from there, Cut Throat City just keeps on piling up the grief and endless complications of a life on the run and outside the law.
What lifts Cut Throat City far above the expected, is the political fury that propels it.
When the Ninth Ward of New Orleans went under the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, the conspiracy theories spread like wildfire, especially the one that said the white men of city hall had dynamited the levee so that only the Ninth would drown, saving the wealthier, whiter suburbs from the worst of the deluge.
Later, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared much of the Ninth not eligible for relief, that anger was only magnified. And so, Cut Throat City emerges as a fable of retribution and redistribution, and not just your standard wannabeswith-guns fantasy.
For all the let’s-meet-at-the-stripbar posturing here, there is still a rawness andmomentum to RZA’s third feature that powers it home. Recommended.