21 Bridges

Average. Mediocre. Ok. Not bad. Not the worst. Ah it's alright, you know yourself. It passes a couple of hours sure. It kills a bit of time. 8 ways to adequately describe 21 Bridges. Adequate, there's another one. 9 ways.

Andre Davis (Chadwick Boseman) is an NYPD supercop. A detective with no qualms about firing back. I.A. don't like him because he's killed 8 bad guys in 9 years. He's someone who can scan a crime scene and work things out in seconds. He's a man haunted by the death of his father, also a cop, in the line of duty. A maverick. A renegade. A walking cliche. One night two men try to rob a drug dealer and in the process of doing so murder seven cops. Andre is called in to solve the crime with the implicit suggestion that he dole out some street justice. The island of Manhattan has a lot of escape routes and the only way Andre can do his job is to seal those routes off and shut down a city. Now him and his partner for the night, Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller), a cop from the same precinct as the dead men, have until sunrise to get their work done.

Sit back and have a think about this film before you watch it. Just using the brief synopsis above see if you can work out what beats it will hit and how it will finish. Yeah? Chances are you've guessed right. Nothing that happens here is a surprise, supposed twists will be seen coming a mile away and bombshell revelations hit with the impact of a kamikaze moth. Even the 21 Bridges of the title don't make any bit of a difference. But that's ok, it makes this almost a comfortable watch, one you can just sit back and zone out too because nowt's going to disturb you here. It's a watch that requires very little effort.

Ya, there's some saucy language and a couple of gory headshots that may upset younger fans of Boseman's Marvel work but anyone who lived through the plethora of cop flicks from the 80's and 90's will have seen this all before and know what to expect. "Oh him, i like him, always plays someone bad, maybe he'll be decent her......oh no, he's dodgy as always." That's the level of laziness on display and there's little to discern this from a million other DTV action movies. Apart from the acting. It's far better than this deserves and as such lifts it from the mire. Boseman is a muscular and driven lead, dripping with sincerity, Miller has fun in a role that would usually be given to a bloke and Taylor Kitsch as bad guy number 2 gives good menace.

At times you get the sense the film wants to be more than it is, that it has something it needs to say. Davis, a black man, angers when he's called a "trigger", a nod towards departmental bigotry. There's scenes of African American men, running terrified from the cops, all of whom want them dead, moments that can't but remind you of the documented and highly publicised scenes of real life violence pouring out of America at the present time. The ways that minorities on the police force, women, people of colour are forced to work harder than others to prove themselves. All things hinted at throughout the film but never followed through on and why would you when there's time for another gunfight or ridiculous chase scene. Ah, what could have been?

21 Bridges is a perfect film for Netflix. Throw it on in the background and talk over it.