21 Bridges: Keep things moving and keep shooting - and did we mention the NYPD is corrupt from the top down?
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-plus
An age-old truism about special effects is that, whenever possible, things should happen in the rain, the better to obscure flaws. Script writing has its own go-to distraction, called non-stop action.
That is to say, when your plot is full of holes – as it is in the Chadwick Boseman starring vehicle, the police-chase/conspiracy movie 21 Bridges – just keep things moving and keep shooting.
Chadwick Boseman is a trigger-happy NYPD detective spending the night chasing cop killers.
The film, directed by Brian Kirk and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, is kind of like a GIF of choose-your-Liam-Neeson-movie, one that stops every so often between car chases, foot-races and bouts of blazing gunfire to give characters a short self-revealing speech that is supposed to explain their motivation to keep shooting. These are dropped like narrative breadcrumbs to lead you to the explanation of an overarching conspiracy (which I still couldn’t explain to you).
For what it’s worth, Boseman’s character, Andre Davis does come with a backstory. We meet him as a child at the funeral of his dad, an apparently trigger-happy cop who took two bad guys down with him before succumbing to a third. We next see him as an adult, following in his dad’s NYPD footsteps, being interviewed by Internal Affairs over his record of shooting first and asking questions later.
Cue the propellant: Two hired hoods (Taylor Kitsch and Stephan James) hold up a cocaine dealer in his lair, and are shocked to find what they’d expected to be a modest haul is actually 300 kilos. They’re then shocked again to find themselves in a fire-fight with an unexpected lot of impatient, armed cops.
Kitsch, the Canadian kid who was once expected to become an action leading man himself, plays a character who turns out to be an ex-military marksman, who kills most of the officers in the fuzzily-motivated confrontation.
And so, 21 Bridges bursts off the blocks, as the NYPD hunts down the mass cop killers, and the aforementioned Davis is put in charge, on the openly-stated expectation that he’ll put down these mad dogs and save the state the expense of a trial.
The title of the movie refers to the 21 access points to Manhattan. Seems the FBI is anxious to get on the case and is giving the NYPD a five-hour ultimatum to prove the suspects haven’t left the state before they take over. (I’m not in law enforcement, but I don’t think that’s how that works).
Anyway, there’s nothing like a ticking clock to keep things moving. In time-honoured police detective tradition, Davis is saddled with a partner he doesn’t want (Sienna Miller), who is supposed to keep him in check, but is apparently even more trigger-happy.
And everywhere our two cop-killers go (their drug kingpin connection, a trained fake-ID artist, etc.), the cops are on their tail, ahead of Davis. So, the run-and-shoot turns into a three-way chase as our hero slowly starts to give his fellow officers the fish-eye (including his sometime mentor, played by J.K. Simmons). And he suspects that he, too, is being set up – as a cop-killer killer.
There’s a lot of dubious explaining in the last act, a sure sign that a movie hasn’t done a very good job explaining itself.
Still, ever since Serpico, scriptwriters have felt confident using all-New-York-cops-are-corrupt as a framework for a lot of otherwise counterintuitive stuff that happens.
In the realm of movies that go boom like a two-hour string of firecrackers, Kirk proves he’s got enough of a sense of style to belong to the club. And Boseman, who, before Black Panther gained gravitas playing Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson, is pro enough to carry Davis with magnetic determination.
Still, we’re left with empty action calories, and memories of events that make less and less sense every minute after you’ve left the theatre.
21 Bridges. Directed by Brian Kirk and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan. Starring Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller and J.K. Simmons. Opens Friday, November 22.