21 BRIDGES

  • 14 Dec - 20 Dec, 2019
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

I rish director Brian Kirk takes the helm of this perfectly serviceable New York crime thriller, co-written by Adam Mervis and Matthew Michael Carnahan. Chadwick Boseman plays Detective Andre Davis, an NYPD officer who as a kid lost his cop dad to violent criminals and now has a Dirty Harry reputation when it comes to deciding on the order in which to shoot and ask questions.

When eight of his uniformed comrades are slaughtered one night by a couple of lowlifes with assault rifles in the course of robbing a cocaine baron, the hardbitten police chief (JK Simmons) gives Davis the nod to track down the culprits with extreme prejudice and assigns a similarly fierce narcotics officer (Sienna Miller) to help him. Davis takes the decision to close Manhattan’s 21 bridges and seal off the island for his manhunt – which reveals a murky world of conspiracy and the time-honoured MacGuffin of a “USB drive”.

21 Bridges has some coolly choreographed chase sequences and shootouts, but for us works best at the very beginning when it is in a “procedural” vein – as Davis works out from the crime-scene evidence available how many shooters there were and where they are likely to be now.

There is an element of melodrama and absurdity of course, contriving subway-train sequences isn’t exactly novel and we’d like to have seen more dialogue scenes between Boseman and Simmons, and Boseman and Miller. But the action barrels along really nicely; there is a terrific flashback scene at the top, showing the infant Andre at his father’s funeral, with a great overhead shot of all the officers outside the church replacing their caps, creating a pointillism of white dots. And the quasi-real-time pursuit is followed with great gusto. Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style. – Compilation

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