Review: Monsters and Men

Monsters and Men (15)

USA 2018  95 mins  Dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green  Cast: John David Washington, Anthony Ramos, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Kelvin Harrison Jr.

A black motorist singing along happily to Al Green is pulled over by two white police officers. He conceals his gun and waits for what is clearly a very familiar ritual to unfold: they treat him with passive-aggressive politeness and he responds with weary resignation as they check his licence and let him go on his way. Only at the end of this tense scene is it revealed that he too is a cop.

We don’t see him again for another 30 minutes as the action in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s thematic companion piece to Blindspotting switches to the first part of its triptych, introducing Manny (Hamilton alumnus Anthony Ramos). He’s married with one kid and a second on the way and has just landed a job working security at the reception of a huge corporate office block in Brooklyn. His wife Marisol (Jasmine Cephas Jones, also from Hamilton) is completing her degree, so things are looking up for the happy couple. But then Manny not only witnesses but records on his mobile phone the police shooting dead an unarmed hulking yet genial street hustler known as Big D outside a store in his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood. It is perhaps no coincidence that this is where Spike Lee shot much of his early work, including Do the Right Thing.

Doing the right thing is the dilemma now facing Manny, especially as the cops are only too aware of the incendiary nature of the footage on his phone and start issuing heavy-handed threats. Next we rejoin Dennis (Washington, hot from BlacKkKlansman), the black patrol officer we saw in the opening scene, who is constantly reminded of the extent of racism in his profession. Viewed with undisguised suspicion by his fellow cops but loyally supporting the force in arguments with friends, he too faces a dilemma that should crystallise his allegiances – what to say when interviewed as part of the internal investigation into the shooting, especially as he’s up for promotion. Finally, we meet Zyrick (Kelvin Harrison Jr.): a high school baseball star whose talents offer him a rare ticket out of the ghetto. But then he’s radicalised after being subjected to a stop and search by those white cops.

Inspired by several real-life incidents – chiefly the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island back in 2014 – writer/director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s feature debut is certainly a timely Black Lives Matter drama that avoids cheap polemic by focusing on the personal experiences of three African-American men who each have much to lose if they opt to speak out. But it also suffers from an awkward La Ronde-style structure to emphasise the ripple effect of the shooting, as well as a tendency towards over-emphasis and stating the bleeding obvious (“Everything’s going to change if you put this out there,” Marisol warns Manny. You think?). Much is, perhaps intentionally, left vague and unresolved – we aren’t shown the actual shooting; the question raised about whether Manny’s flat has been turned over by corrupt cops looking for his phone footage is never answered – with the result that the film occasionally feels thin and underdeveloped even as it provokes much-needed debate about racial profiling.