Mark Reviews Movies: CUT THROAT CITY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 20, 2020

At a certain point in Cut Throat City, P.G. Cuschieri's screenplay seems to forget what story it's trying to tell. It begins with a group of friends, who are forced by circumstances to work for a notorious crime lord. Things don't work out, of course. As this attempted saga of post-Katrina New Orleans unfolds, though, the movie, directed by RZA, reduces these characters' roles significantly.

One couldn't even call them pawns within a bigger game. They're on the sidelines, not even watching what's happening. Indeed, they're seemingly unaware that there's any kind of game happening around them.

The result is odd, although occasionally intriguing. While Cuschieri fails to deliver in terms of clear-cut protagonists, who drive or are at least vaguely involved in the story, he does present us with a series of fascinating, if also underdeveloped, supporting characters.

They're crime lords, yes, but also a city council member, who actually wants to do good by the city but is too smart to know that it'll happen by doing actual good, and a pair of police detectives, one of whom is by-the-book and the other of whom has ripped out the pages of the book, set them on fire, and spit on the ashes. These are the characters that have captured Cuschieri's imagination and show this story's potential as an off-beat and almost philosophical take on a crime tale. It's too bad they and the ideas they represent essentially disappear as soon as our underutilized heroes return.

The four friends are Blink (Shameik Moore), Miracle (Demetrius Shipp Jr.), Junior (Keean Johnson), and Andre (Denzel Whitaker). They've known each other for years—for some, more upon those years. The story opens with Blink, a comic book artist with dreams of making it big, marrying Demyra (Kat Graham), his long-time girlfriend and the mother of his young son.

On the wedding day, news reports talk of a hurricane approaching, and in the aftermath, as we all know, parts of the city are devastated by flooding, caused by levees offering shaky protection to the impoverished areas of the city breaking. The friends debate a conspiracy, either intentional or fortunate in the eyes of the people who could profit from Black people being forced out of their homes and businesses.

The reality, though, is that they're left to hustle in order to survive. FEMA is in town, but financial assistance isn't coming their way. Blink meets with a publisher to sell the graphic novel he has been creating, but there's no interest. Miracle is selling drugs, poorly, waiting for his break as a rapper. Junior, the only white guy in the group, is raising a dog with plans to breed eventually. Andre plays the trumpet, but as one of the crime lords points out later, jazz left this city a long time ago.

This setup is solid in terms of its foundations—the characters and their all-too real plight. Soon enough, the group decides to look for work from "Cousin" Bass (Tip T.I. Harris), Demyra's cousin and a local gangster who uses raccoons to torture those who don't pay what he's owed. The job is to rob a casino, and after, they and Lucinda Valencia (Eiza González), the investigating detective, are caught up in a widespread power play between various factions.

The quartet goes on the run (Wesley Snipes plays Blink's father, who lives off the grid in a shack on the bayou), and in their stead, the movie follows all of these side players, who are really calling the shots behind the scenes. They're all engaging in some way. Cousin is ruthless but with his peculiar and aforementioned methods. His opponent is a crime lord named the Saint (Terrence Howard), who operates a cocaine empire out of a church and has an Old Testament view of justice to go along with his penchant for quoting scripture.

As the counterpart to the dedicated and hard-nosed Valencia, there's Courtney (Rob Morgan), a crooked detective who snorts cocaine in front of his colleague and has a crew of his own. Above but very aware of all of this criminality is Jackson Symms (Ethan Hawke), a former cop who is now a government official. He hopes to clean up and bring businesses into his ward, while increasingly realizing that he might have to get his hands dirty in order to do so.

Among these characters is a labyrinthine collection of dynamics—who is loyal to whom, who is really in charge, who is prepared to betray whom and for what reason. When these characters talk, it's not just about matters of plot, either. There are real discussions here, and on a deeper level, there's a fairly cynical proposition of which kind and how much corruption this city needs in order to return to some kind of normalcy.

Just as Cuschieri leaves the four main characters to wait it out, all of these ideas are abandoned when the quartet returns for a climactic action sequence, which ultimately leads to an equally clichéd bit of narrative trickery. Cut Throat City offers the pieces of a sprawling story of economic injustice, crime, and corruption, but it never figures out how to bring them together in any meaningful way.

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