Mark Reviews Movies: A SHOT THROUGH THE WALL

A Shot Through the Wall, Vertical Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | January 20, 2022

The eponymous event of A Shot Through the Wall is presented and repeatedly affirmed to be an accident. A movie that actually cared about all the things put forth by writer/director Aimee Long's debut feature might take a moment or two to question that assertion. Instead, Long mostly deflects from that central point—why a cop draws his gun in a residential building, without any visible or even presumed threat nearby—for a different conversation.

That discussion has to do with race. Our protagonist, a rookie police officer in Brooklyn, is the 26-year-old son of Chinese immigrants. The man who is shot and killed, when the cop discharges his pistol while pulling it from the holster for no apparent reason, is a 26-year-old Black man, simply standing in the kitchen with his mother, when the bullet tears through the wall and into his torso.

The incident becomes a scandal, obviously, as well as reason for protests. Mike Tan (Kenny Leu), the cop, spends most of the movie trying to convince anyone and everyone who will listen that he isn't racist.

Long is clearly attempting to load the debate in Mike's favor. When he drew his sidearm, he couldn't see anyone, and of course, there would be no way for him to know who was in the apartment into which the fatal shot went. Under these circumstances, how could the killing, unintentional on his part, be motivated by race?

Forget the fact, apparently, that Mike and his fellow rookie partner Ryan (Derek Goh) only ended up in the apartment building while chasing a Black teenager there. Also forget that the only reason the they were chasing the teen was because he ran, on account of the cops interrogating a group of Black teenagers—engaged in the seemingly suspicious behavior of carrying backpacks while walking home from school. There's a chain of events, assumptions, and decisions here that Long ignores.

Even if we ignore all of that, the movie still has the key sequence of events with which to deal: whatever assumptions Mike possessed to make the decision to pull out his gun. It never does address any of that, but the screenplay does give Mike a Black fiancée named Candace (Ciara Renée)—just so we really know there's no way the guy is racist, as protestors and some news outlets claim or suggest. Indeed, there's so much deflection happening here that the movie can only hint at the legal, moral, and systemic issues that arise from this story.

The plot unfolds as a sort of informational thriller, in that Mike has to deal with and adapt to his situation as he keeps getting new and, for him, worse details about the case. At first, his precinct captain Walker (Clifton Davis), who also happens to be Candace's father, puts Mike on paid leave while an internal investigation into the shooting happens. Mike's union representative (played by Dan Lauria) assures him that all of this is standard procedure and that he'll be taken care of through the whole process.

In between moments of guilt and anxiety, Mike just goes about his life. The biggest challenge initially is how and when to tell his supportive father Chow (Tzi Ma) and his judgmental, overbearing mother May (Fiona Fu).

Things collapse for Mike—and quickly. There's to be a grand jury hearing, and while the union rep reassures Mike that no cop has been indicted in over a decade, they come back with an indictment anyway. Now, Mike has to worry about an upcoming trial, while also finding a way to present his side, himself, his family, and his personal life to the public, without exploiting the people he loves to repair and maintain his own image.

Whether or not this is the correct or even the most interesting story to be telling with this particular setup is mostly a moot point. It isn't. It couldn't be, really, as soon as Long stacks the deck almost exclusively in Mike's favor, avoids the lives of and consequences for the people who are directly harmed by the shooting, evades the reasons the shooting happened in the first place, and only hints at a police culture that would use Mike and his case to cover up for what seems to be a genuine case of a racially motivated police shooting. Everything that's worth talking about and examining in this story is kept in the background, as Mike tries to juggle a media rehabilitation effort, shadowy activists trying to (literally, in one case) paint him as a racist, and his relationships.

If this constantly feels like the wrong angle for this tale, Long does provide a fairly in-depth and increasingly cynical view of how such an image-rehabilitation effort works and twists what really matters (even if it becomes unintentionally amusing how Mike is always the last one to know every new development). It's not until the very end of A Shot Through the Wall, after a sudden and questionably ironic conclusion to the plot, that the movie genuinely confronts the pain of its premise. By then, it's far too little and far too late.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products