Blindspotting (2018)

In the Before Times when there wasn’t a pandemic, even when I went to the movies on a very regular basis, that still didn’t mean I saw everything. And one thing I missed back in 2018 was the movie Blindspotting. I don’t remember why. Possibly because it was more of an arthouse film and it wasn’t in the local AMC very long. Possibly because when I was selecting tickets with my Stubbs pass days in advance I didn’t remember what it was. But I saw the trailer many times, and it looked like a drama where an African American man’s white friend was a risk to the former’s freedom as his probation came to an end.

Well, it turns out that trailer was maybe a little misleading. All that stuff is in there, but it was the parts inbetween that were unexpected.

Convicted felon Colin (Daveed Diggs) has only three days to go on his probationary period. If he gets caught doing one thing out of line, such as possession of a firearm, he’ll go back to prison. However, his longtime best friend Miles (Rafael Casal) just got a gun, and while Colin is working very hard to be good and seems to have matured quite a bit after his prison stay, Casal is a bit hot-tempered and a trouble-maker. Plus, since Colin is black and Miles is white, Miles may not realize how much of his behavior is less likely to get himself in serious trouble due to his skin tone.

Now, the trailers played up Miles’s temper and made him out to be a really bad friend. However, the movie itself does quite the opposite. We see, for example, Miles has a black wife and young daughter and may be a (mostly) responsible parent. He and Colin grew up in Oakland together, and the only thing that really sets him off is someone suggesting he’s just like the gentrification-creating hipsters moving into the neighborhood when he’s lived there his whole life. He and Colin work together as movers, and during those scenes, the movie is actually quite funny as Miles pulls various stunts and Colin plays the straight man (and sometimes unwitting victim). The point is, it is easy to see why Colin and Miles are friends.

But the movie does have some great dramatic moments, most of them Colin’s, and much of them come when people tell Colin, a clearly more mature and responsible character as far as the audience is concerned, that he and Miles are very much the same or Miles learned that behavior from Colin. When we see why Colin went to prison, we see Miles was involved but spent no time in jail as a result. Colin is haunted by dead black men, killed by cops, including one he witnessed himself during the course of the movie.

That makes for a stronger movie. The comedy is funny, and the drama works. It allows the film to make a statement about police violence, white privledge, and still allow Colin and Miles to be friends. Plus, the movie gave original Hamilton castmember Digs to do some verse at the end of the movie for a particularly tense scene. This movie just works really well, and I wish I’d seen it in the theater two years ago when I had the chance.

Grade: A-