Black and Blue
“Black and Blue” is fairly black-and-in the way it views the world. It wants to illuminate complex ideas, but relies on standard cliches. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but the potential for more is there if the film did more than just paint everybody in this thriller as on one side of the line or the other. I don’t know why I hoped for more; I think I just wanted to see the film do more with what it set up.
The film starts out with Alicia West (Naomie Harris), a rookie police officer riding along with her partner, Kevin (Reid Scott), through the 9th Ward in New Orleans where she grew up. Her mother has just passed away, and she is home after ten years in the Army, and two tours in Afghanistan. She’s finding it difficult to assimilate with the people living in the 9th Ward because of being a police officer, especially with the criminal element so pervasive in the area. She agrees to a double shift so that Kevin can have “date night” with his wife, and she finds herself on patrol with Officer Brown (James Moses Black), but before their shift together ends, she will find herself on the run when she captures, via her body cam, a police execution of local drug deals by Narcotics officers (Frank Grillo and Beau Knapp) Brown goes to meet. But can she find someone to trust when she’s a cop, and the streets are filled with crime?
Trying to explain that plot, you can see interesting germs of a narrative in this film, and that’s not including Tyrese Gibson’s store manager who helps Alicia out, and the people in the neighborhood who don’t trust the police after years of police brutality and misdeeds, and recent criminal behavior being brought to the forefront by the DA within the police department. The idea of a black woman, who wants to genuinely do good as an officer, being seen with skepticism by a largely black community, and will need to put away their prejudices against the police to help one in trouble, is a great idea for a police drama. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the civilians we meet in “Black and Blue” are criminals, and we don’t really meet a single fully innocent cop on a personal level, basically muting any sociopolitical impact this film could have. When the film reaches its third act, there are interesting allusions to Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” that could have really be exploited when West makes a choice to put herself in the hornet’s nest, but it all ends in a completely predictable, and kind of unbelievable, way. Thankfully, Harris and Gibson give solid performances, and cinematographer Dante Spinotti creates a great sense of atmosphere for this thriller, otherwise this movie would be even more disappointing.
