j* Movie Reviews 2019

21 Bridges (2019)

Cops and robbers rarely feel this tense.

My action preferences lean big, which is to say I want something large going hard... a car, a Trex, a robot, a mutant thing, a spaceship, a dragline... whatever. Cops and robbers are generally not high on my list because they're just human sized and do a lot of shooting. And that's exactly what this is, but lo, it was good. The shooting, especially by our crims, has that real compressed air thunking going on. Heavy bullets. I really like heavy bullet sounds in a shooting film.

I felt so wrapped up in the tension of this. It isn't just cops solving a crime, because we know all about the crime from the get go - from the beginning we're riding with the robbers. And one of those robbers is Taylor Kitsch. It's always suspenseful to see him in every new role... since Snakes On A Plane I've been a fan. And I watch with intrigue as he becomes increasingly, um, rugged with age.

Anyway, our main dude, the killer-of-cop-killers, is played by Chadwick Boseman. And here he is far more black panther than he was in Black Panther. With the huge associates-of-Marvel pedigree involved in the making of this, it's interesting to kind of note where they've taken some of the sort of beats and action you might expect from a superhero flick and made it more grounded. It still has the hero of the city, he still has a tragic backstory, there's still the belief that he is the only one who can save them and everyone is always nagging him to use his powers. I might be waxing lyrical to describe it as "Marvel-noir"? But I certainly felt that the action, the gun-battles, the chases were all crafted with some of that comic-spectacle, but dosed with gritty realism. For me it was a balance that really worked.

Having developed an audience bond with both our cops and our robbers, I found the playing out super tense. There's a nice literal ticking clock - Manhattan is only closed until 5am and if they don't catch the cop-killing robbers by then, it's over.

Slow burn intrigue, fast burn action and a lot of dark brooding tension.

J* gives it 4 stars.