Swiftly following his suspenseful home invasion thriller, The Intruder, director Deon Taylor delivers Black & Blue: a chase and evade, corrupt cop action flick that’s pithy but by-the-numbers due to flat characters, slack execution and a banal central concept, yet is bolstered slightly by a well-paced plot.
The set up introduces Naomi Harris’ rookie cop Alicia, who is accosted by racist police officers while out on a morning jog. This opening suggests a compelling drama with substantial issues is about to unfurl, but these themes are soon supressed as the story curtails into clichéd urban crime thriller terrain with a double-crossing cop plot.
Alicia accidentally films a murder on her body camera and is then hunted by the killers who want the footage before she can share it. What follows is a fast and flawed action/chase confrontation that repeatedly derails then re-finds its feet to potter on perfunctorily before stumbling once again.
The set up introduces Naomi Harris’ rookie cop Alicia, who is accosted by racist police officers while out on a morning jog. This opening suggests a compelling drama with substantial issues is about to unfurl, but these themes are soon supressed as the story curtails into clichéd urban crime thriller terrain with a double-crossing cop plot.
Alicia accidentally films a murder on her body camera and is then hunted by the killers who want the footage before she can share it. What follows is a fast and flawed action/chase confrontation that repeatedly derails then re-finds its feet to potter on perfunctorily before stumbling once again.
- 10/24/2019
- by Daniel Goodwin
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Question: If you’re a cop movie coasting on a dynamic central performance, how fast do you need to move to hide the fact that plot-wise, you’re little more than a bargain-basement Training Day? The reliably terrific Naomie Harris — Miss Moneypenny in the last three Bond films and a knockout as the junkie mom in the Oscar-winning Moonlight — stars as Alicia West, a rookie African-American police officer working her first three weeks on the beat in New Orleans. We first meet this army veteran, who has a tour of...
- 10/22/2019
- by Peter Travers
- Rollingstone.com
A timely yet undercooked action-thriller about police corruption and racism, “Black and Blue” cuts to the chase from its very first, promising sequence. Along the beats of Lecrae’s social injustice-themed “Welcome to America,” Alicia West (Naomie Harris) jogs through the middle-class streets of a suburban New Orleans neighborhood, only to be stopped and harassed by a pair of suspicious white cops, interrogating her with excessive force for no reason. It’s not long before the cops realize that “she is a blue,” a part of their team, and let her go; though with palpable arrogance. It’s clear that they would face no consequences, even after illegally slamming one of their own against a fence. Their privilege happens to be standard operating procedure.
It’s a powerful scene, all too real in today’s world where amateur cell phone videos of similar or worse cases of police brutality continue to go viral.
It’s a powerful scene, all too real in today’s world where amateur cell phone videos of similar or worse cases of police brutality continue to go viral.
- 9/25/2019
- by Tomris Laffly
- Variety Film + TV
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