Review: 21 Bridges Is a Cop Thriller with a Confounding Sense of Timing

It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.

21 Bridges
Photo: STX Entertainment

It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release 21 Bridges than the present. The film’s premise, about police bringing Manhattan’s transit system to a complete halt in order to facilitate a manhunt for two cop killers, draws immediate parallels to the explosion of NYPD officers in the city’s already crowded subways in order to crack down on turnstile jumpers. The speed with which the NYPD seals off the borough in 21 Bridges is presented not as a chilling glimpse into police-state overreach, but as a hip montage of professional efficiency, a show of inflamed passions at the loss of several colleagues in the line of duty.

Spearheading this initiative is Detective André Davis (Chadwick Boseman), a trigger-happy cop with a history of killing perps. We meet Davis as a child sitting in a cathedral watching the funeral of his father, a cop killed by strung-out crackheads. As the reverend (John Douglas Thompson) gives a shockingly bloodthirsty eulogy, celebrating the dead policeman as a warrior for punishing the two of his three attackers by killing them, we see young André (Christian Isaiah) gradually stifle his tears, embracing the steeliness of the man he would become: a hard-edged cop eager to put any criminal who dares stand up to him in the ground.

Davis finds ample traction for this worldview among the members of a police precinct where eight officers are murdered by two thieves, Michael (Stephan James) and Ray (Taylor Kitsch). As McKenna (J.K. Simmons), the local police captain, tells Davis at one point, the wives and children of the slain cops will be so profoundly consumed with mourning that they shouldn’t have to be dealt the additional “trauma” of seeing the perpetrators going through the legal process of trials and appeals. In so many words, McKenna asks Davis to “spare” the families such a burden, and it’s an assignment that the young detective very much relishes.

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21 Bridges never really pauses to consider how Davis let a childhood trauma justify a lifetime of dubious behavior under the legal protection of a badge, and indeed, it presents his dogged pursuit of the killers through the clichés of so many thrillers about loose-cannon cops driven by their take-no-prisoners intensity. Yet even before Davis enters the crime scene, we see how the murdered cops were implicated in the drug trade that Michael and Ray disrupted by robbing a cocaine stash that was clearly protected by the cops who happened upon the heist. And this advance knowledge of the dirty ties that the slain officers had to the underworld creates a potentially intriguing dramatic irony in Davis’s quest to sanctify the fallen officers.

But instead of using the audience’s awareness of the greater truth to critique its hero, the film merely barrels through a series of plot twists that are twists only to Davis. He obliviously seeks vengeance for dirty cops whose equally corrupt colleagues launch their own ruthless efforts to silence Michael and Ray, as well as anyone who could expose their involvement in New York’s drug trade. This makes Davis, in many ways, ancillary to the story, a third wheel that’s ostensibly meant to come off as sympathetic to the audience.

Of course, the only way that Davis can seem like a good guy is for 21 Bridges to never call the morality of his manhunt into question. And when the film shows any disgust at all, it’s in the way that the other cops’ unseemly connections make them unfit for the job that someone like Davis upholds so fiercely: Our protagonist quickly picks up on the suspiciousness of his colleagues’ behavior, yet the film treats the ruthlessness of crooked officers covering their asses as somehow different than his own hyper-violent sense of justice.

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When, late in the film, Davis summarizes his feelings on the police getting involved with the drug trade by saying “that blood cannot be on the badge,” he sounds ridiculous, so certain of his own moral righteousness even as he, too, leaves bodies in his wake. In the end, 21 Bridges suggests that the only true problem with the increasing power of a police state is that some cops might be unworthy of the authority otherwise duly invested in them.

Score: 
 Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller, Stephan James, Keith David, Alexander Siddig, Taylor Kitsch, J.K. Simmons, Louis Cancelmi, Victoria Cartagena  Director: Brian Kirk  Screenwriter: Adam Mervis, Matthew Michael Carnahan  Distributor: STX Entertainment  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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