Standard-issue cop thriller
BLACK AND BLUE
DIRECTOR: Deon Taylor
CAST: Naomie Harris, Tyrese Gibson, Frank Grillo, Mike Colter, Reid Scott, Beau Knapp RUNNING TIME: 110 min
CLASSIFICATION: 16 L V
RATING: ★★✩✩✩
A TIMELY yet undercooked actionthriller about police corruption and racism, Black and Blue cuts to the chase from its first promising sequence.
Along the beats of Lecrae’s social injustice-themed Welcome
to America, Alicia West (Naomie Harris) jogs through the middle-class streets of a suburban New Orleans neighbourhood, 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 realise 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 amateur cellphone videos of similar or worse cases of police brutality go viral.
Its harrowing vigour is rooted in its unspoken relevance and its cinematic tautness – a virtue director Deon Taylor (The Intruder) doesn’t manage to seize throughout.
While the premise of Peter 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, favouring fast and repetitive chase scenes over well-calibrated tension.
The premise is a bit too closely matched with Antoine Fuqua’s far more effective Training Day, down to a brazenly re-created bathtub scene that stands as a pointless remake rather than homage.
Dowling and Taylor deserve some credit for trading Ethan Hawke’s young, idealistic but inexperienced white male cop for a woman of colour, navigating the contradictory odds stacked against her.
In that, 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 embraced by the diverse community she serves and stuck amid a well-oiled machine of white-enabled corruption.
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 black man by police forces.
West learns quickly that she can’t trust anyone while plotting her escape from officers who put the blame on her and demand her head on a silver platter, a shady criminal group that includes the intimidating Darius (Mike Colter) and the vicious Terry Malone (Frank Grillo).
With her partner Kevin (Reid Scott) bearing traces of ambiguity, she turns to Mouse (Gibson) for refuge, a convenience store owner who wants no part in this escalating crime maze, but lends West a helping hand all the same, acting as an intermediary between West and an angry community about to turn its back on her.
For the most part, legendary cinematographer Dante Spinotti keeps the unimaginative but serviceable action clean and coherent. It’s not the sweaty and adrenaline-heavy cat-and-mouse pursuits that pack the fiercest impact. It’s the quietly played scenes that prove most memorable after the end credits.
Black and Blue registers as a standard-issue cop thriller with merely fleeting insights on the racial and social issues it aims to dismantle, while often being overwhelmed by Geoff Zanelli’s redundantly severe score that competes with the on-screen action.
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.