Equal Standard: Well-Meaning BLM Cop Drama Loses the Thread
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C-
A multiple point-of-view New York cop drama for the Black Lives Matter era, Equal Standard puts two incidents of police violence side by side. After an unarmed Black man is shot by a white cop, both the police and the Black community are on edge.
When that incident is followed by the death of an out-of-uniform white cop who is killed when a Black colleague returns fire, there’s outrage all around. The internal investigations into the two shootings take different paths.
While the subject of racism and the law is urgent, the NYPD cop genre is, in a sense, comfort food. You settle in for the familiar domestic scenes of policemen at home, the macho camaraderie and peer pressure of the squad room, the violent stand-offs, the internal affairs interrogation rooms and so on.
It’s no surprise to find Ice-T, an actor-rapper — who has made his career playing both sides of the cop-criminal line — here as both executive-producer and as actor in a minor role.
Ice-T had his first starring role in one of those New York police dramas, Mario Peebles’ New Jack City (1991). A year later, he earned the outrage of Republicans and police groups with his lyrics for the heavy metal protest song, “Cop Killer.” In his best-known incarnation, he’s been a mainstay of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order: Special Victims Unit since 2000, as a Republican-voting police sergeant.
Equal Standard means well, doesn’t stereotype black or white characters unduly, and offers hope instead of rage. The trouble is the movie is just poorly executed. As directed by Brendan Kyle Cochran, the ungainly story is hobbled by erratic pacing, uneven acting, and a lack of momentum. There’s a limit to the number of effective adrenaline jolts that can be gained from watching beefy men yell obscenities and shooting each other.
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Inasmuch as there’s a protagonist, it’s African American police detective Chris Jones (Tobias Truvillion, in a solid performance), who we first see heading off on his shift, kissing goodbye to his wife, Sergeant Jackie (Syleena Johnson) and cute daughter.
When the news breaks about another case of a white cop shooting an unarmed Black man, Chris and the other cops look concerned and talk about the need for “accountability.” But later that night, when exiting a bodega with a friend, Chris is confronted by two belligerent out-of-uniform white cops, determined to prove their control of the streets. When he chastises them for their rudeness and attempts to get their ID, one of them shoots at him twice, hitting him in the hip. Chris, on the ground, fires back, killing the man.
Though we eventually progress to the two internal affairs investigations, the screenplay by Taheim Bryan does a lot of hopscotching about. The model appears to be HBO’s gold-standard series The Wire, as we glimpse the lives of internal affairs cops, to the mayor’s office, to peace talks between with Crips and Bloods, and regular Black corner guys. The street corner scenes, at least, have a loose informality, otherwise missing in the preachy script.
The oddest subplot follows the dead policeman’s Irish American family, including one sensible cop brother Kevin (Chris Kherson), and one racist loose cannon, Josh (Brad Fleischer). The latter goes to a church to link up with a virulently racist elderly clergyman (Dan Rover) who, with his long white mane and twinkly manner, comes across more like a mischievous warlock than white supremacist.
More attention to direction would have made for an entirely different, less predictable movie.
Equal Standard. Director: Brendan Kyle Cochran. Written by Taheim Bryan. Starring Tobias Truvillion, Ice-T, Maurice Benard, Robert Clohessy, Syleena Johnson, Anthony “Treach” Criss. Available June 4 on video on demand.