Unlike
the vast majority of moviegoers last weekend, I wasn’t much in the mood for happy
feel-good movies like ‘Frozen 2’ or the therapeutic ‘A Beautiful Day in
the Neighborhood’ starring Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers.
OTOH I love morally ambiguous, hard-boiled crime thrillers like ‘Heat,’
‘The Town’ and the criminally (pun fully intended) underrated ‘Triple 9.’ “Black Panther” Chadwick Boseman’s new movie,
’21 Bridges,’ seems to fit the bill from what I’ve seen of its trailer so I
decided to give it a look despite its rather lackluster score on Rotten Tomatoes.
’21
Bridges,’ so named because there are that number of bridges in and out of
Manhattan that had to be “locked down” during an intensive manhunt in the
ungodly pre-dawn hours, begins with a crime gone hideously awry when two small-time
drug robbers’ seemingly easy snatch-and-run job ran afoul of what I would call
a “most unfortunate coincidence.” Okay,
they unexpectedly ran into cops who miraculously appeared at the scene of the
crime and had to shoot their way out, killing seven of New York’s finest before they could make good
their getaway. The rest of the movie then follows
Detective Andre Davis (Boseman), who’s under investigation by Internal Affairs
for being trigger-happy, as he and his forced-on partner, Narcotics Detective
Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller), attempt to track down and apprehend the cop
killers by 5:00 a.m. before the city wakes up to the hustle-and-bustle of
everyday life.
’21
Bridges’ is a dark, suspenseful and gripping thriller told with the immediacy
of desperate men on both sides of the law going about their business with single-minded conviction. It has a certain “clock is ticking” real-time feel to it, like those ’24’ TV shows where Kiefer
Sutherland runs around town racing against time trying to stave off one crisis after
another. While ’21 Bridges’ is gritty,
ultra-violent and operated in shades of gray rather than in simple
black-and-white, it is nevertheless a solid, competently made thriller that I would
heartily recommend.
Grade: B+
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