Mark Reviews Movies: 21 BRIDGES

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2019

To damn with faint praise, 21 Bridges is wholly competent. It certainly moves, as a police detective who seemed destined to become a cop faces his most difficult challenge: the murders of eight police officers—as well as one drug dealer, although he doesn't seem too broken up about that one—who apparently stumbled across the robbery of at least a hundred pounds of cocaine. He's a good detective—maybe one of, if not, the best in New York City. What he discovers and encounters on a long night of shootouts and chases, though, tests his beliefs in justice and his fellow cops' willingness to serve it.

That's the personal story screenwriters Adam Mervis and Matthew Michael Carnahan are trying to tell, as all of those shootouts and chases unfold. It's obvious, though, that director Brian Kirk would rather get to the action as quickly as possible and, from there, sustain it for as long as possible. The result is, again, competent—moving from action sequence to action sequence, filled with bloody and devastating violence, across the city, while unraveling the mystery of why a bunch of cops just happened to show up at a restaurant with more than 600 pounds of cocaine in the freezer. The action and the plot matter to Kirk. The characters don't so much.

It certainly doesn't seem as if that will be the filmmakers' approach at the start. The movie opens with a prologue and a couple of introductory scenes. The prologue has the boy who will become a great detective mourning for his father, a well-respected police officer who died in the line of duty. The kid may only have had 13 years with his dad, but in that time, a fellow cop eulogizes, the boy learned a lot through lesson and by example—mainly, the point we're mostly supposed to take from the scene, that a person should follow his or her conscience, no matter what others may think.

The story jumps ahead 19 years, and Andre Davis (Chadwick Boseman) has grown up to join the police and rise through the ranks. The first introduction has him sitting in front of Internal Affairs, justifying a recent shooting—one of nine over his career. All of them, he insists, were justified. He only shoots as a last, life-defending resort, and he never shoots first. The second sees him caring for his widowed mother (played by Adriane Lenox), who is suffering from memory issues in her older age and—because none of this really matters in the movie's estimation—is never seen, heard from, or mentioned again for the remainder of the movie.

Indeed, this is the end of any development for our hero, who spends the rest of the story proving that he's the great detective, the honest cop, and the good man those initial scenes establish him to be. That's just fine for the movie's primary goals, which are to reveal a mystery and provide plenty of action sequences in between the exposition. There's a lot of "just fine" here, and as a result, the whole affair just feels as if the filmmakers are settling for the easy path, missing plenty of opportunities along the way.

The plot is a lengthy chase, after Michael (Stephan James) and Ray (Taylor Kitsch) rob cocaine from a Brooklyn drug dealer, with Ray killing eight police officers in the process. Andre is assigned as lead detective on the case, and McKenna (J.K. Simmons), the local precinct's captain, wants justice exacted as soon as the perpetrators are found. Andre, who's partnered with local narcotics cop Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) would rather take them in alive, so that real justice can be served.

With the FBI wanting to take over the investigation and manhunt, Andre decides upon a drastic tactic: shut down the entire borough of Manhattan, where the murderers are soon spotted, and flood the island with cops. The feds give him four hours to catch the killers.

In the rush to get to the action and the details of the mystery (which isn't much of one, to be honest), the filmmakers ignore the characters (The killers, weirdly, might get the most development here, as they try to sell the drugs and escape the city), downplay the plot's ticking-clock gimmick, and never give us any real sense of the manhunt gradually narrowing its scope (Other cops have a habit of getting to Michael and Ray before Andre can, which makes him suspicious of everything that has happened). Instead, we merely get shootout after shootout, chase after chase, and standoff after standoff, and while Kirk stages these sequences with an understandable sense of chaos, that's about all there is to them, since the movie's surrounding elements are so shallow.

Yes, it's a competent chase movie, with at least a superficial feeling of momentum. It's all surface, though—the broad characters, the ever-moving plot, the sheen of New York at night, the gory violence, the eventual and inevitable revelation of corruption. 21 Bridges sets out to do a simple job and do it well, but it's more like doing a simplistic job and doing it with the most minimal of effort.

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