A couple of movies I bought last holiday season had previews for this movie November Criminals. Then I saw it on Amazon Prime so I figured what the hell, might as well watch it. I mean it was free and I didn't have to go anywhere.
The movie is about two white high school seniors named Addison (the eponymous Baby Driver) and Phoebe (Hit Girl from Kick-Ass) who have long been friends and decide to finally be friends with benefits. Before going off to have sex for the first time, they stop at the local coffee shop, where they get coffee from their black friend Kevin. And like two minutes after Addison and Phoebe leave, Kevin is gunned down, not in a robbery attempt either.
When Addison finds out he goes to the coffee shop and sees Kevin's body taken away. And hears the cops and press write the whole thing off as a gang killing. Which makes no sense to him because he's pretty sure Kevin wasn't in a gang. But Kevin was a young black kid in DC who got shot so obviously it's a gang thing!
Addison refuses to take this simple answer and so puts up posters around school asking for information, which leads to him getting suspended. Meanwhile, a kid tells Phoebe that Kevin was hanging out with some bad people. Eventually Addison finds out from Kevin's parents that he was using drugs and he and Phoebe meet with a drug dealer named D-Cash who uses Addison for a drug mule in exchange for giving him the identity of the killer.
So Addison goes to confront the guy. And it turns out that D-Cash paid the guy to kill Kevin because Kevin had pissed him off. D-Cash sent Addison to the guy so the guy would kill him. Thinking about it later, this made no sense to me. If D-Cash wanted Addison dead, why didn't he just do it when Addison went into the ghetto to meet him? It would have been pretty easy: middle-class white kid goes to ghetto, runs afoul of gangs, case closed, right? By siccing Addison on the guy, D-cash lets Addison call Phoebe and tell her everything so even if Addison died, she'd be able to blow the whistle.
Anyway, the movie starts out with this whole thing about racial stereotyping that because Kevin is a black kid in DC he must be in a gang. But then by saying he's on drugs and hanging around with people like D-Cash aren't they actually embracing the same racial stereotype? No one, not even his parents, really question WHY Kevin might be on drugs. He's a young black kid, so of course he's on drugs! And of course he's going into the ghetto to meet with drug dealers!
The movie is far more concerned with the bland, CW-style romance between Addison and Phoebe than it is with finding out the truth about Kevin. Actually, Kevin is only shown in one scene. Shouldn't there have been some flashbacks of him? Addison finds out from a school employee that Kevin has had trouble emotionally for about a year, but there's never any reason given. That was probably when he started using drugs, but why did he start using drugs? By all rights he was doing well in school and had good friends and two loving parents, so why would he start abusing drugs? But hey, we don't need to actually explore that issue; he's a young black kid, isn't that enough? What other reason do you need?
So what I'm saying is you have a movie that initially wants to stand against racial stereotyping, but by its own indifference to the person of color who's murdered, the movie ends up embracing the same stereotyping. It becomes what it's supposed to hate. It would have been a much better movie if it actually believed what it was trying to sell.
1 comment:
I saw this one previewed in front of something I rented recently and hoped it was good...kinda sad it's not :(
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