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SHOOTING HEROIN
Director: Spencer T. Folmar Cast: Alan Powell, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Sherilyn Fenn, Garry Pastore, Rachel Hendrix, Cathy Moriarty, Nicholas Turturro, Daniella Mason, Jordan Fitzsimmons, Brian O'Halloran, Jaqueline Siegel, Jeremy John Wells, Nathan Clarkson, Pat Romano Jr., Dax Spanogle MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:30 Release Date: 4/3/20 (digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 2, 2020 Things escalate quickly in the third act of Shooting Heroin. That's to be expected in any story, but after the long delay of getting to that point in this movie, it's jarring. It's especially so here, since the escalating events seem to lose track of the point of the story until then. Writer/director Spencer T. Folmar's movie is about a small town undergoing an opioid crisis, and people are starting to feel powerless. In the prologue, one man murders his neighbor, a drug dealer, and some find it to be justified. Adam (Alan Powell), a war veteran, is on the fence about it, until his younger sister dies from a heroin overdose. After a lot of setup, including stops at multiple bars with the town's only cop (played by Garry Pastore), Adam decides to start a volunteer drug-enforcement task force, consisting of himself, grieving mother Hazel (Sherilyn Fenn), and correctional officer Edward (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs). They get to work, searching cars heading into town, stopping dealers in the woods, and implementing a tough search policy at the local high school. They also confront a doctor overprescribing pain medication and a pharmacist who fills a big order without any questions. Folmar establishes the problem, for sure, but when it comes to any kind of reasonable solution, he is, understandably, about as lost as anyone else in the face of all of this. Adam's plan, at first endorsed by Edward and questioned by Hazel, looks, at best, uncomfortably authoritarian and, at worst, like vigilantism (The two men use the threat of a rifle to get what they want). Ultimately, this isn't Folmar's position, because the threat of violence eventually becomes the reality of it. When one of the main characters is killed in a shootout, the movie completely shifts narrative and thematic gears to become a melodramatic debate (culminating in two opposing marches) between hunting down drug dealers to be killed and, well, not doing that. Maybe things have become so bad that people believe the former is a justifiable option, but if that's the case, society is in a much bigger mess than the drug problem. As for Shooting Heroin, it's its own kind of mess, with a narrative that takes far too long to get going and a sudden shift in purpose that leaves all of its established problems unanswered and unexplored. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
drug content, and language throughout)
