Black and Blue

Black and Blue is a timely movie, but not a successful one.  It mostly wants to be your standard B-Grade cop thriller with some performances that are better than the norm.  But it also wants to be "important" and "about something" at the same time.  So we get a run of the mill action film, mixed with some heavy-handed melodrama and social commentary.

It's message is certainly not a bad one.  It wants to take a critical look at the relationship between minorities and cops, and the tensions between them.  I can picture this creating a thriller of intense paranoia where you don't know who to trust.  My problem is how broadly this movie decides to paint its message.  There's no moment here that feels honest, lived in, or genuine.  I constantly felt like I was watching a "dramatic reenactment", due to how the film keeps on relying on various editing tricks (slow motion, rapid-fire editing), and a music score that plays almost non-stop throughout the movie, telling us how we're supposed to be feeling every second of every scene.  This is a movie that needed a more realistic and gritty approach.  Instead, it comes across as a gimmicky cat and mouse thriller that never raises the tension as high as it should.

The film was directed by Deon Taylor, who just five months ago, gave us one of the most laughable thrillers of 2019, The Intruder.  That was the film where Dennis Quaid played an unconvincing psychopath who targeted a young couple who bought and moved into his former home.  At the very least, he shows improvement here, in that I wasn't constantly laughing at the staggering stupidity of his characters like last time.  But, he still shows no sign of subtlety, pacing or tension.  This is a movie that places its heroine, a rookie cop named Alicia West (Naomie Harris), into what should be a nightmare scenario.  She spends almost the whole movie running from her fellow officers when she finds out they're crooked, and witnesses them pull off a murder.  Not only are her former trusted friends after her to silence her, but she's trapped in a community that doesn't trust cops.  She grew up in the neighborhood, but her former friends pretend not to know her, because she now wears a uniform and a badge.  She's not "one of them" anymore.

There is no safe place for Alicia to go, and no one she can trust.  Not only are the cops trying to kill her, but they've turned some of the local drug dealers on to her trail, blaming her for the death of the dealers that they killed.  And because Alicia is wearing a uniform, none of the locals want to help her or get involved.  They simply judge her silently from afar, and push her away when she asks for help.  They don't even care that she's been injured.  This very premise should create palpable tension, more than enough to carry an entire film.  And yet, Peter A. Dowling's script never quite gains enough momentum to create the suspense that it wants to.  The movie throws the "Us vs. Them" card into its theme so many times, and without an ounce of subtlety, you kind of start to feel bludgeoned by the film while you're watching it.  It makes its point early, and then it keeps on making that same point over and over.  We get repetitive scenes of Alicia thinking she's found someone to trust or a way out of her situation, only to have it go wrong, and she has to keep on running.

But, a lot of the tension is killed by the fact that Alicia seems almost abnormally fast at times, and is so deft at hiding, the villains never are able to track her down until the movie wants them to.  She finds one person to trust, a shop owner named Milo (Tyrese Gibson), and this slowly builds into a relationship that feels tacked on and unconvincing, because it feels like the filmmakers thought there should be a romantic angle somewhere.  Yes, Milo and Alicia do have a past with each other we learn, but we don't hear much about it.  We just know that they used to know each other before Alicia joined the military in order to escape her lifestyle, and eventually became a cop.  It's just one of many elements within the film that feel false, because the movie relies on cliches of the cop thriller genre.  We even get the scene where one of the villains is making his way through a dark room, searching for Alicia, and he starts talking out loud about why he did what he did, mostly for the benefit of the audience, as we have not really had any real motivation behind his murderous actions, other than he's the bad guy.

Still, none of this is as bad as the last few minutes of Black and Blue, which seems to be desperately trying to give the movie an overly bright and happy ending.  This is a film that should have ended with some uncertainty toward the future.  Instead, the movie adds multiple scenes that show Alicia getting exactly what she's been fighting for the entire film.  It rings false, and smells of studio interference, who probably wanted to make sure the audience walked out calm and happy.  That right there spells out the problem with this film.  A movie about racial tension should make you uncomfortable, and leave you with more questions than answers.  This one tries to, but then it tacks on a couple final scenes that send the wrong mood to the audience.

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