Monsters and Men

Reasonably balanced presentation of this highly charged subject that we, unfortunately, see all too frequently in today's headlines. A strong nuanced performance here by John David Washington as a conflicted NYPD police officer. Also, a solid big screen debut of writer and director Reinaldo Marcus Green. However I didn't like the ambiguous ending here.

I was very excited to see this film and it certainly did not disappoint. A film of this kind is as relevant as they come and is up there in the ranks of other films with similar themes this year, such as Blindspotting and Black KkKlansman.

Manny, played by Hamilton's Anthony Ramos, records and looks on helplessly as his friend (who is African American) is shot and killed by the police. The killing has a ripple effect on the community and a plethora of citizens make their voices heard on the matter. Manny is just a family man who is trying his best to get by and provide for his family, but he ultimately puts his future in jeopardy to raise awareness of his friend's death.

John David Washington portrays Dennis Williams, a black police officer who has himself received questionable treatment from other police officers while off duty. He understands people being upset about the police killing, but he also feels that those people don't understand what it is like to be a cop, what it's like "out on the streets." The decision to have a black police officer as one of the lead characters was a great idea, as we get more than just one perspective.

Kelvin Harrison Jr. portrays Zyrick, a young and promising baseball player who decides to get involved in the fight by raising his voice along with so many others. Zyrick's father's desire is for him to reach baseball stardom, to leave the cruel streets behind him and achieve his wildest dreams, to not wind up shot on the streets like the man mentioned. This film is really about three characters and how their lives transpire after the shooting, and Zyrick was probably my favorite.

The ending to this film was the icing on the cake, brilliantly conveyed. There were several scenes in the film that emitted so much power, and the performances were fantastic. This film isn't one-sided and that's what I love about it; you get the story told from a police officer and from people on the other side. If you want to see a human story and a relevant theme told from different perspectives, go see this.

If Monsters and Men were a more incendiary testimony to police brutality, as its title suggests, the audience would be fired up to demonstrate in favor of minorities who have been wronged in "stop-and-frisk" injustices. Fortunately, it's not more volatile; it is rather a thoughtful, albeit measured, rumination on racism and inequality.

Debut director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, takes a careful look at an event that sounds like the death of Eric Garner in 2014 Staten Island. In Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood, Nuyorican Manny (Anthony Ramos) witnesses an innocent youth murdered by a policeman in an all-too frequent stop of young black men. Manny spends the first part of the film tortured about the right thing to do with his evidence.

In a second of three segments, black patrol officer Dennis (John David Washington) is conflicted between his loyalty to the force and his understanding of how the system does not favor black men. Although he's dropped from the rest of the film, he represents the moral quandary about the injustices and the fact that some characters will not follow the usual clichés of these message-type dramas.

The film doesn't so much as preach, either through voiceover or ponderous character, as it shows the daily indignities of young NYC black men in the white-dominated system that makes justice elusive for him and his peers.

In the final segment of the tryptic, Zyric (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) is a gifted young athlete forced by his conscience to join the protest against brutality and at the same time jeopardize his future to play pro baseball. Like Monsters and Men, Zyric asks you to join him deciding to do the right thing. Not everyone does.

Sadly this happens.

Hopefully one day it will cease to.

The film starts out well enough, the acting is good and the story nuanced. The starting material and development are powerful, if predictable (nothing wrong with that). Perhaps to counter this, the option was to consecutively follow three different perspectives on the same events, three characters who hardly intersect, each with a clear "role" in terms of message. Although permanently unresolved issues are a key component of the film, in the end for me it felt disjointed due to this, three partial stories not necessarily making up a single great on. But I look forward for more from this director.