I suppose it's a lot to ask for these days: a police action thriller not based on real life that is made honest-to-goodness for a movie theater and not for an hour of weeknight television. The beginning of this movie suggests grand things. A young Andre Davis attends the funeral of his father, a NYPD officer murdered while on duty; a monochromatic sea of black under an overcast rain shower before the police fire their weapons in his honor. As an adult, Andre has become a renowned officer in his own right, and quickly is assigned to the latest case.
The economy of this film is admirable in many ways (apart from its terrible title). Because of his recent credits, Chadwick Boseman doesn't need much introduction for us to believe he's a total badass. Because of the introduction, we know the story's gravity without so much as a single word of dialogue. Because of the casting choices, including JK Simmons as the cop captain and Sienna Miller as the narc detective, we're keenly aware that Andre's skin color puts him in a somewhat dangerous environment at work, even when he's not chasing down criminals.
Unfortunately, the actual plot of the film is disappointingly straightforward and simple. There's not a single twist I didn't see coming by the end of the inciting incident. Basically, after the funeral, we get the crime: Taylor Kitsch and Stephan James (I think they had character names, but nobody cares) break into a winery after hours to steal 30 kilos of cocaine from the . We already have questions, like "why the hell are these small-time drug thieves armed as if they're heading to war?" and "is this how bougie restaurants in big city downtowns stay in business?" But suddenly everything goes awry. They discover at least ten times the amount of cocaine, and then an entire squad of police show up for seemingly no reason. The two criminals shoot their way out, murdering a bunch of cops along the way, and embark on an odyssey through a New York City night.
It's not hard to guess that these cops are dirty, and that before the end of his chase Andre will be fighting street thugs along with more cops than he'd like to count. What's interesting about this movie is that everyone is written more or less sympathetically. The thieves and cop killers are desperate for money just as much as the cops whose wives are sick or whose kids need to go to school. Andre gets put into several hard places to hold people responsible for the evil things they do, proving himself smarter and faster and more principled than all of them. While the film doesn't try to take us on a roller coaster of plot twists and shocks, it asks us to consider the heavy moral weight Andre puts on each decision he makes as one of the only people with integrity in the whole movie.
Then again, for such a short film, I'd have preferred more story and characterization than all these chases on foot and by car, shootouts, and bullets-flying standoffs.
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