Mon­sters and Men

Sea­son three of the ​‘Ser­i­al’ pod­cast took a rad­i­cal approach in its inves­ti­ga­tion of the Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem by spend­ing one year in the courts of Cleve­land, Ohio and exam­in­ing the imbal­ance of pow­er through every­day cas­es. It scru­ti­nised the bru­tal lev­el of force used by the local police on African-Amer­i­can men and the impact that had on their lives and the community.

Reinal­do Mar­cus Green’s debut fea­ture aims to start a com­pa­ra­ble and nuanced dis­cus­sion in its depic­tion of the after­math of a fic­tion­alised shoot­ing in Bed­ford-Stuyvesant, Brook­lyn but it’s nowhere near as com­pelling as it should be.

Green places his cam­era in all the right places, peer­ing into the neigh­bour­hood and homes of three res­i­dents to paint a trip­tych of sorts. Antho­ny Ramos plays a young father full of poten­tial who wit­ness­es and films the shoot­ing, John David Wash­ing­ton is a cop strug­gling with the bla­tant racism in his line of work, and Kelvin Har­ri­son Jr is an ambi­tious school kid on the cusp of grad­u­a­tion who is inspired to join an activists’ group in the wake of the killing.

All the prin­ci­pal cast do good work with what they’re giv­en, but there’s lit­tle in the way of weighty exam­i­na­tion of their inner lives as Green’s script occa­sion­al­ly dips into the kind of basic sto­ry­telling you might expect to find in an edu­ca­tion­al film. It’s frus­trat­ing to watch after the poet­ic style of Car­los López Estrada’s Blindspot­ting blast­ed its con­fronta­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty on screen in 2018 cov­er­ing sim­i­lar the­mat­ic territory.

The part­ing shot in Har­ri­son Jr’s nar­ra­tive pro­vides the most poignant moment in the film, with a sports­man enact­ing peace­ful protest in a large audi­to­ri­um. Leav­ing the view­er to pon­der on this pow­er­ful image, which reflects a grow­ing polit­i­cal move­ment in the USA, is rous­ing enough, but the rest of the film doesn’t always pos­sess the same ele­gant gravitas.