I will say this for the trailers for 21 Bridges: they made this movie look as cool as hell. Granted, that’s the job of a trailer. It’s really a commercial for a movie, and I go to the movies often enough that a lot of them get old. But 21 Bridges didn’t, and changing the release date from summer to November seemed to suggest a lot of confidence from the studio.
But then the reviews started to come in suggested the movie is, at best, rather average. Well, I am never one to just take a so-so RT score at face value–even if they are right more often than not–so I went to see for myself.
Chadwick Boseman stars as NYPD detective Andre Davis. As a boy, his father, also a cop, died in the line of duty. Following in his father’s footsteps, Andre has a reputation as a guy who can and will use lethal force a bit more frequently than most. However, Andre is generally quick to point out all his kills were justifiable, and he always makes sure before he pulls the trigger.
Into all that comes a drug heist gone wrong. Two men (Stephan James and Taylor Kitsch) rob a fine restaurant of what they think is only about 30 bags of pure cocaine. It turns out the place has about 300 bags, and the cops seems to show up awfully quickly. During the melee, the crooks escape and eight cops are mortally wounded. Andre is called in to take a look, to the general pleasure of precinct boss Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons, spouting a decent at best New York accent). McKenna only requires Davis take along narcotics detective Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller, spouting a ridiculous New York accent). Some quick police work tells Andre the crooks are on the island of Manhattan. It’s the wee hours of the morning. They can shut the island down for a few hours before the FBI takes over jurisdiction. From there, Andre needs to find the guys and figure out what happened because there’s a lot going on that doesn’t smell right.
Well, it turns out the Rotten Tomatoes score was more or less on the money. 21 Bridges isn’t a bad movie, and Boseman anchors the movie well when he’s onscreen, but the script here is incredibly cliche. Both Andre and Stephan James’s Michael (the easily less violent of the two crooks) figure out something ain’t right here. This is more than just some cops dying in the line of duty. We get a scene early on of Andrea caring for his elderly mother, but there isn’t much to him that hasn’t been seen before. He’s the smart detective that many people wonder about, and who sometimes butts heads with other authority figures. That said, the first half of the movie largely works.
It’s the second half that has problems. A chase scene, showing what extreme lengths the NYPD is going to to get one guy, comes across as extreme and even somewhat incoherent. At one point, Andre’s life is saved by dumb coincidence. That sort of thing can take a viewer like me out of the movie.
Of course, most viewers aren’t like me, and I can see a casual moviegoer enjoying this one for what it is. It’s a perfectly average cop drama that has some nice performances, competent for the most part direction, and a familiar script. If that’s enough for you, you can do far, far worse.
Grade: C+
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