Matthew Wilson praises the skill that goes into making Detroit an expertly tense thriller but finds some aspects easier to praise than others.
After Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, I was looking forward to Detroit. Kathryn Bigelow has fashioned herself as one of the most interesting, politically charged, filmmakers of the modern age and her partnership with Mark Boal has served both of them, exceedingly, well.
It’s clear that their aim was to frustrate their viewers with an all-too-familiar situation that has been seen throughout race relations in the past fifty years. Instead, they end with a film that shoots itself in the foot with its own incompetence.
Set during the Detroit riots in 1967, where black residents (fed up with the racial abuse of the predominantly white police department) started burning and looting neighbourhoods, turning the place into a war zone and forcing the National Guard to be called in to try and contain the violence.
On July 25th, R&B group The Dramatics find themselves stuck in the middle of a riot and are separated. Lead singer Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and his friend Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) end up at the Algiers Motel and wait for the others. While doing so, they start talking to two white girls, Julie-Ann (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever) who introduce them to their friends Carl (Jason Mitchell) and Aubrey (Nathan Davis Jr.). Carl plays a prank on some nearby Nation Guard soldier and fires at them with a toy pistol.
Thinking that a sniper has been taking shots at them, the Guard and the police storm the Algiers looking for the shooter with Officer Krauss (Will Poulter) leading the charge and Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a private security guard, standing watch.
Acting, on the whole, is good throughout. Larry had the strongest character arc. A man with big dreams, and a bright future, suddenly finding himself, and his friend, at the mercy of militarised racism. Larry and Fred are two of the most proactive victims but it’s usually Larry who makes the first move. He doesn’t want to lie over and submit but at the same time he knows the cops will beat him, or worse, if he gives them a reason to. Where he ends up by the end of the film is a tragic showing of the larger effects of racial violence.
Karen, Julie-Ann and their soldier friend Greene (Anthony Mackie) don’t have a large part to play in the story but their presence is felt. Being two white girls in a line-up of black men, Karen and Julie-Ann face a lot of sexual threats and it adds another level of tension to the, already, fraying situation.
Poulter does a solid job as the film’s main villain, Krauss. Aided by his cohorts, Flynn (Ben O’Toole) and Demens (Jack Reynor), Krauss takes over the film with an iron fist and a sense of self-righteousness a mile wide. What’s scary is that Krauss believes he’s doing the right thing. when he realises that he’s dealing with a group of black men, he slowly, but surely, unleashes everything he has at them because to him they’re not human.
As much as it pains me to admit, Boyega is the film’s weakest link. Playing Melvin, he just feels out of place and he effects so little of the rest of the film that it’s a wonder why his character is even mentioned at all. I like Boyega but this character just didn’t work for him or the film.
You cannot deny Kathryn Bigelow can still rake in the tension and where it counts, though. This film works. The accuracy of the time period is fantastic with the use of archival footage and newspaper headlines, to remind the audience that this actually happened, is a strong choice.
While I think the 2 -and-a-half hour runtime is a tad long, I like how Bigelow used that time in the first act to set the scene. To show us the city of Detroit and just how broken it was. It’s a scale that, even in today’s society, we’ve not seen since.
Once the second act kicks off, Bigelow starts really grinding on the tension - ignoring the toy gun problem - because, as soon as Krauss and his gang have the victims against the wall, the mood is set for what has to be the next hour. Anyone and everyone could get a baton to the face just for looking in the wrong direction. The one-by-one mock executions, where even the prospect of breathing was too dangerous to try, the entire Motel sequence is one long, slow, draw of the knife. It makes a good portion of the film but it’s such a well-crafted set-piece that you don’t realise how long you’ve spent there.
Detroit is out now in cinemas.
