Its heart may have been in the right place, but I found this docu-drama just too contrived, artificial and in the end, sensationalist to at any time ever really convince me that this could have happened yesterday in America, which was no doubt the writer / director's aim. These are days when fiction is very far from being stranger than truth.
The shocking initial images of a young black boy being shot by a panicked white cop in front of the victim's dad, principally using body-cam images, are purposely almost identical to authentic footage captured in a number of recent high-profile cases in America, so much so that my wife, watching the film with me, actually checked to see if we hadn't accidentally stumbled instead on a real-life documentary. And yet, when she told me that the story being told was a work of fiction, somehow all the tension for me faded away and I found myself instead reacting against the forced realism and cinematic devices of what I was actually witnessing.
The film has echoes of the 50's Hollywood classic "Twelve Angry Men" as the young cop who lost his head and shot down the fourteen year old unarmed male is forcibly "tried" by a jury of assembled prison inmates, police office employees and even passing members of public of mixed race and sexes after the boy's dad, obviously an ordinary, decent guy and a former soldier who has served in Iraq, corrals a group of friends, family and ex-military colleagues to forcibly take over the police station where the boy's killer has been allowed to immediately return to work. Outside we are meant to be aware through hostage negotiation telephone calls, cutaways to the deployed S.W.A.T. team gathering outside and of course, that staple item, mocked-up TV news-reporting that all this is supposedly happening in almost real-time, but eventually the film boils down to the cop, who has already been acquitted by the prevailing justice system, being re-tried by the "people", while his own colleagues, of mixed races themselves, are chained up and under threat of their armed captors, made to witness and then participate in his show-trial.
I'm not saying the verdict this second jury reaches is wrong but as a viewer, I too keenly felt I was being manipulated by the filmmaker as I listened to the predictable defences of the police officers trying to justify their actions in situations like this. The writing tried to put up, only to knock down, every defence, no matter how thin (black-on-black crime statistics, gangsta rap?) as to why a so-called trained officer could somehow shoot to kill an unarmed black youth and sure enough, it ends with the young, uniformed perpetrator, who is shown in the end to be a loving, caring family man, duly bawling his eyes out in contrition before making his peace with his captor at the end of the siege.
For me, then, the film tried too hard to cover every position before arriving at a supposedly shocking conclusion that I felt was predictable and indeed, pre-ordained from the start. I get that on one level, the film was about a loving parent seeking closure for the inexplicable and irreplaceable loss of his son but this for me was overshadowed by the film's political agenda. I think the reasons why these cases still arise in different police forces across America are more complex than could be summarised in one well-meaning but in the end, over-earnest drama like this.
The shocking initial images of a young black boy being shot by a panicked white cop in front of the victim's dad, principally using body-cam images, are purposely almost identical to authentic footage captured in a number of recent high-profile cases in America, so much so that my wife, watching the film with me, actually checked to see if we hadn't accidentally stumbled instead on a real-life documentary. And yet, when she told me that the story being told was a work of fiction, somehow all the tension for me faded away and I found myself instead reacting against the forced realism and cinematic devices of what I was actually witnessing.
The film has echoes of the 50's Hollywood classic "Twelve Angry Men" as the young cop who lost his head and shot down the fourteen year old unarmed male is forcibly "tried" by a jury of assembled prison inmates, police office employees and even passing members of public of mixed race and sexes after the boy's dad, obviously an ordinary, decent guy and a former soldier who has served in Iraq, corrals a group of friends, family and ex-military colleagues to forcibly take over the police station where the boy's killer has been allowed to immediately return to work. Outside we are meant to be aware through hostage negotiation telephone calls, cutaways to the deployed S.W.A.T. team gathering outside and of course, that staple item, mocked-up TV news-reporting that all this is supposedly happening in almost real-time, but eventually the film boils down to the cop, who has already been acquitted by the prevailing justice system, being re-tried by the "people", while his own colleagues, of mixed races themselves, are chained up and under threat of their armed captors, made to witness and then participate in his show-trial.
I'm not saying the verdict this second jury reaches is wrong but as a viewer, I too keenly felt I was being manipulated by the filmmaker as I listened to the predictable defences of the police officers trying to justify their actions in situations like this. The writing tried to put up, only to knock down, every defence, no matter how thin (black-on-black crime statistics, gangsta rap?) as to why a so-called trained officer could somehow shoot to kill an unarmed black youth and sure enough, it ends with the young, uniformed perpetrator, who is shown in the end to be a loving, caring family man, duly bawling his eyes out in contrition before making his peace with his captor at the end of the siege.
For me, then, the film tried too hard to cover every position before arriving at a supposedly shocking conclusion that I felt was predictable and indeed, pre-ordained from the start. I get that on one level, the film was about a loving parent seeking closure for the inexplicable and irreplaceable loss of his son but this for me was overshadowed by the film's political agenda. I think the reasons why these cases still arise in different police forces across America are more complex than could be summarised in one well-meaning but in the end, over-earnest drama like this.