Strong performance by Naomie Harris anchors police story, “Black and Blue.”
There are those of you, like me, who wonder, “Why doesn’t Naomie Harris get more starring roles?” Good news: “Black and Blue” is here.
This is not a hard-hitting look at racial relations between police and AfricanAmericans, as the title might indicate. Instead it ’s an unapologetic piece of genre filmmaking in which Harris is caught between bad cops and a bad neighborhood. She is backed by a steady supporting performance by Tyrese Gibson, efficient, no-nonsense direction by Deon Taylor and gunmetal gray cinematography by Holly wood veteran Dante Spinotti.
The British-born Harris, best know as Moneypenny in the Daniel Craig Bond films and excellent as Winnie Mandela in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” and the mother in “Moonlight,” is Alicia West, a rookie New Orleans cop fresh off two tours in Afghanistan. Little does she know she is operating in a another war zone in the very neighborhood where she grew up, an impoverished section of New Orleans in which cops are the enemy.
Just three weeks on the job, she stumbles upon three cops executing a drug dealer. She thinks she’s providing backup, but when they see her, they turn their guns on her. Her bodycam captures the footage, and she gets away. Soon she’s the most wanted person in the city — by the bad cops who want the bodycam footage and her death, and by the drug kingpin (Mike Colter aka “Luke Cage”) who thinks she was the one who executed one of his own.
Alicia enlists the begrudging help from a childhood friend, Milo (Gibson, of the “Fast and Furious” franchise), who has avoided gang life by working at a convenience store and minding his own business.
Sure, “Black and Blue” is a minor film, but it ’s irresistible. In the 1950s, this would have been a low-budget, gritty American noir, or a French policier. In the 1970s, it might have been a blaxploitation f lick. Instead, it ’s part of the growing genre credentials of Taylor.
This is his third suspense film released in the last 18 months, after “Traffik ” and “The Intruder,” and he’s getting pretty good at it.