21 Bridges

This is going to sound like a mad con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, but I think the mak­ers of 21 Bridges strug­gled to come up with a title for their film. They maybe didn’t have much idea of what they were attempt­ing to make, or at least had trou­ble zero­ing in on the aspect that makes this New York-set cop thriller unique from the mil­lion New York-set cop thrillers that came and went before it.

They have opt­ed, some­what obscure­ly, to ref­er­ence the 21 over ground access points to Man­hat­tan island, which are closed down for one night in order to ensnare a cou­ple of on-the-lam cop killers. (Tun­nels and fer­ry routes, which are equal­ly impor­tant in this case, do not war­rant a men­tion). The title makes it sound like a tran­quil archi­tec­ture doc­u­men­tary, not a work which includes numer­ous shots of peo­ple suf­fer­ing the gory effects of close-range bul­let trauma.

The added twist is that, even though a mild fan­fare is made when surly city offi­cials green­light a request made by Chad­wick Boseman’s trig­ger-hap­py detec­tive Andre Davis (fet­ed in the city as the pre­mier killer of cop killers) to close all the bridges to pre­vent their sus­pects from flee­ing, the sus­pects nev­er actu­al­ly get as far as try­ing to flee. So the bridges – all 21 of them – are nev­er spo­ken of again. The trou­ble caused to late night com­muters, or rev­ellers look­ing to return home to one of the oth­er four bor­oughs, is entire­ly unnec­es­sary – all because some­one, some­where couldn’t dream up a bet­ter title for their shit­ty cop story.

I hear what you’re say­ing: focus­ing exclu­sive­ly on a film’s bad title is unfair, as it over­looks all the oth­er cre­ative aspects that went into this earnest work of cin­e­ma. Sor­ry, no. The bad title ends up being indica­tive of copi­ous oth­er mis­steps, the largest being the story’s almost whole­sale inco­her­ence. Bose­man is on the trail of two masked shoot­ers (Tay­lor Kitsch, Stephan James) who have snagged 50kg of uncut cocaine and need to offload it very quick­ly. With the full arse­nal of the police state dig­i­tal secu­ri­ty appa­ra­tus at his beck and call, it doesn’t take long to have them in his sight-lines.

Ridicu­lous­ness lev­els peak ear­ly as Bose­man slinks on to crime scene where eight offi­cers have met their mak­er. With­in sec­onds he is able to not only deter­mine the fact that there were two gun­men, but is able to cor­rect­ly flesh-out entire char­ac­ter pro­files. He is quick­ly teamed up with a nar­cotics offi­cer played by Sien­na Miller, who is strange­ly hap­py to be work­ing with a man who wants noth­ing more that to mur­der any­one who mur­ders a cop.

As this Dirty Har­ry wannabe hunts his pray with dead-eyed deter­mi­na­tion, he slow­ly learns that fas­cism is not always the best way for­ward. Luck­i­ly, he’s able to extend an olive branch to James’ errant ex-Navy offi­cer as the film has gone to great pains to empha­sise that, even though he’s embroiled in some very bad shit, he’s not actu­al­ly respon­si­ble for any of the deaths (how that could be ver­i­fied by any­one is ques­tion that is blunt­ly diverted).

In all it’s a bit of a steely hor­ror­show of mud­dled pol­i­tics, lop-sided char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions and plot holes that could swal­low entire galax­ies. It attempts in the end to build a moral jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for why cops seem to have such itchy trig­ger fin­gers these days, but its the­o­ry is at best flawed and at worst deeply offen­sive. There’s no doubt that a placid archi­tec­tur­al doc­u­men­tary about bridges would’ve been far superior.