Black and Blue (2019)
Directed by Deon Taylor
Rookie cop Alicia West, an Army veteran, inadvertently captures the murder of a young drug dealer on her body cam. After realizing that the murder was committed by corrupt cops, she teams up with the one person from her community who is willing to help her as she tries to escape both the criminals out for revenge and the police who are desperate to destroy the incriminating footage.
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What critics say influenced Black and Blue
Black and Blue is a generic, by-the-books police action thriller that takes so many pages out of better police procedural action thrillers, such as Training Day and The Fugitive and then has the dialogue on par with every network police drama, which begs the question, “Are you sure this wasn’t a failed Starz miniseries or a Starz TV movie?”
And the premise itself is a bit too closely matched with Antoine Fuqua’s far more effective “Training Day,” down to a brazenly re-created bathtub scene that stands as a pointless remake rather than homage.
In movie speak, it translates the issues associated with Hurricane Katrina and Ferguson, Mo., into the Denzel Washington police thriller Training Day, modifying that fevered police-brutality scenario with a female protagonist so that it fits the millennium’s Me Too agenda.
Instead it hits it briefly and doesn’t do much with the topic, instead building a thriller that feels oddly derivative of Antoine Fuqua’s “Training Day.”
The result is decent, but not as much fun as I recall "The Warriors" being or with the same sort of Oscar-level performance of "Training Day." Director Deon Taylor gets some decent mileage out of the action scenes, and as long as you don't think about all of the movies featuring bad cops and/or those where the criminals want a certain cop dead, you might go along for the ride.
If I were one of those hackish ’90s screenwriters in Robert Altman’s The Player, my pitch of Black and Blue to the coked-up executive du jour would simply be “It’s Training Day meets The Hate U Give.” Just like Denzel’s unofficial Oscar reel from 2001, Black and Blue is about an idealistic rookie cop named Alicia (Naomie Harris) coming across violent police corruption and struggling to survive the day as she’s being hunted by both the crooked cops and residents of the astronomically underprivileged neighborhood she patrols, who understandably hate her guts simply because of her job and the race-based brutality it represents.
Director Deon Taylor works here with master cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who shot some of Michael Mann’s best films including “Heat” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” as well as Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential.”
Finally, veteran Dante Spinotti’s ( L.A. Confidential , The Last of the Mohicans ) cinematography is dazzling, the kinetic grace of his camera movements creating a visually visceral allure I was unquestionably drawn to.
Shoehorning social commentary into the action was another mistake - it's no Sicario - because this literally is a story where you need to cut to the chase.
Taylor implements an editing and scoring style of the 2015 film “ Sicario ,” which the filmmaker obviously (and sometimes blatantly) uses as a mood board.