Black Cop goes out with a whimper, not a bang

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2018 (3046 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“There are better ways to deal with my anger. So I’m going to do it.”

So says the titular police officer of the title (Ronnie Rowe Jr.) in an ominous foretelling of bad behaviour to come.

Written and directed by Halifax-based filmmaker Cory Bowles, Black Cop presents a distressingly common social problem — harrassment and violence toward black people perpetrated by white cops — from a fresh perspective.

He doesn’t have a name in the context of the film, so let’s call Rowe’s character BC. We first meet him in uniform staring down taunts and challenges from the participants of a Black Lives Matter rally.

He assumes a mask of contempt towards the whole event.

But when BC is later targeted by a white cop while jogging off-duty, the experience tips him into a destructive cycle of revenge.

When BC puts the uniform back on, he intervenes violently when he sees a cop hassling a couple of black teens.

He then proceeds to give the white citizens of his nebulous east-coast city (it was filmed in Halifax) a taste of the violence and needless provocation routinely endured by black citizens.

Bowles, who adapted this from his own short film, had a couple of directions he could have gone.

He could have shot it as a broad satire, a cop-on-the-edge movie prismed through the absurdist lens of racism.

Or he could have gone full-on Bad Lieutenant, in the vein of that disturbing 1992 Abel Ferrara movie wherein Harvey Keitel embarks on an exercise in self-annihilation while nominally investigating the rape of a nun.

Unfortunately, Bowles walks down the middle, sacrificing some impact with stylistic flourishes that diminish the righteous potency implicit in the paradoxical title.

Some terrific, albeit highly uncomfortable moments pop up often in the film.

Reversing the polarity of the white cop/black suspect dynamic in the scenes where BC hassles a sampling of white citizens is well handled, incorporating subjective body-camera footage, security video and third-person phone footage for an effect that is horrifying yet dismayingly familiar.

But Bowles is too quick to pull back from the abyss, retreating to a safer place when he had a chance to explore the depths of BC’s rage.

Rowe would have been up to the task. He looks the part of a tough cop, but the actor clearly has the will and desire to go deeper.

Instead, the film ends with a whimper, not a bang. Drama and satire are rarely a good mix, and the film would clearly have been stronger without the latter.

That doesn’t mean Bowles had to abandon a vein of hope, mind you. Even Bad Lieutenant had a redemptive ending.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing