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Director
Brian Kirk
Cast
Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller, Stephan James
Producer
Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Mike Larocca, Gigi Pritzker, Chadwick Boseman, Logan Coles
Music Director
Henry Jackman, Alex Belcher
Killer cops or cop killers – this movie has plenty to say about both. What is interesting in ’21 Bridges’ is the way the film deliberately and cinematically blurs distinctions, and shows how the Police Department and the media systematically tom-tom dead cops as martyrs, and denigrate their killers as vermin, whose ratholes need to be burrowed into, and their escape routes blocked. However, the dialectics of gun violence, the film suggests, is more complex and layered.
Armed robbers lift bags of cocaine from a liquor shop in Manhattan. The Police arrive silently and are taken by surprise with the serious assault weapons that the two men possess. Eight cops are killed in the resultant encounter. A manhunt is ordered. There are 21 bridges out of Manhattan, and in a military style operation, Detective Andre Davis (Chadwick Boseman) orders them all shut down for the night.
Davis is the son of a highly decorated Police Officer who was killed in action when Andre was a little boy. He comes with a reputation of being a cop who shoots to kill, though he claims that he never pulls the trigger without sufficient cause or danger. But tonight, as a black man, his job is to take down, with extreme prejudice, the more dangerous of the two killers, Michael Trujillo (Stephan James), also black.
’21 Bridges’ is a slick police action film with no real plot surprises. But, unusually for this genre, the movie shows both cops and their killers as victims of a larger system of funded crime, one which exists because the financiers are out of reach of the law. So when an intelligent and thinking man like Davis, who has worked a few things out in his own head, and from the scene of the crime he has just investigated, comes face to face with the cop killer, he is loath to kill him. He desperately engages with him, in dialogue and negotiation, as long as he can stretch it.
There is a level of tension running through this film that keeps it from being a run of the mill, cops and killers movie. Some of this edge has to do with the persona and innate skill of the lead actor; an ability to project a gnawing anxiety in the character he inhabits. The other is the way this director switches his empathy away from the cops, and establishes a dual perspective, in his presentation of the trigger of violence.
’21 Bridges’ is an absorbing watch.
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