Detroit: This Is Gonna Hurt

I’m the kind of person who tries to not get too involved with politics whenever possible, especially with volatile and divisive issues where saying the wrong thing could land you in hot water, but sometimes bringing it up is inevitable. In the case of Detroit, a fact-based procedural shining a light on one of the most heinous and under-covered cases of racially driven police brutality in American history, courtesy of the writer-director team behind The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the subject is pretty hard to avoid, especially since it’s coming out in a time where relations between US law enforcement and the African American community are more bitterly divided than ever. Your opinion on it is probably going to boil down to where you stand on the subject, and while my problems with the movie have more to do with mainstream Hollywood’s methods of handling these kinds of subjects than the movie itself, Detroit is still a tough movie to watch, discuss or write about in any context.

Our story takes place on July 1967 in the midst of the infamous 12^th Street Riot, one of the largest race riots in US history. The focus is on one particular incident where police and National Guard are summoned to the Algiers Motel after gunshots are heard and mistaken for sniper fire. The raid quickly escalates into an interrogation lead by a violently racist cop (Will Poulter) who proceed to psychologically torture, beat and humiliate the mostly black occupants for information, ending in three deaths. Some of the victims include Larry Reed (Algee Smith), a struggling singer and former member of Stax vocal group The Dramatics, a pair of out-of-town white girls (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) who came to the motel with Larry, a Vietnam vet (Anthony Mackie) who came to the Motor City looking for work, and a security guard (John Boyega) who tries to play middle man between the cops and the attendants.

The movie is divided into three sections, each of which could be the basis for a film itself. The first act highlights the events that sparked the riot and its aftermath; the police overreached during a raid on an after-hours party, the frenzied onlookers began destroying everything in sight, the mayor ordered the National Guard to patrol the streets, and over the course of five days the city was turned into a war zone. After our principle characters are all introduced, we see them gather at the Algiers Motel where the bulk of the movie takes place. Once the raid begins, it becomes a bottle story with the riots acting as a backdrop. Finally, we’re presented with the court case where we’re more or less shown how the cops got away with it. While this was clearly a highly racially driven event, Kathryn Bigelow and Marc Boal take a very matter-of-fact approach to the story. Much like Dunkirk, they’re more concerned with what happened rather than why.

Each chapter, especially the first two acts, are shot and framed in a way that drop you right in the middle of the action. The mixture of handheld camera work and footage from the actual event makes the setting uncomfortably real, especially when otherwise lighthearted situations are brought down by the grim reality. Anyone who’s been to a party that was shut down by the fuzz is probably familiar with this dramatic shift, but even though not everyone has been in a situation like that where it escalated as much, from a directing standpoint it translates phenomenally. The Algiers Motel incident especially is shot in a similar style to The Hurt Locker, in that it’s shot like a war film. The performances are all grounded, the violence is realistic without being gratuitous, and the tension is tighter than a guitar string. All the actors pull their weight, but the standout has to be Will Poulter, who does way too good a job of making his character as irredeemably vile as humanly possible. There were points where he was giving King Joffrey and Ramsay Bolton from Game of Thrones a run for their money.

While the mastery of tension is undeniable and they try their best to be as historically accurate as possible, that loyalty to the truth sometimes ends up working against it. For one, there were some details of the incident that were unreported or unsolved, and some that were even more horrifying than fiction, so they had to take some creative liberties to fill in the blanks. (Though to their credit, they do fully admit this before the credits.) Its pathological devotion to the facts wouldn’t be so bad if the movie didn’t have anything to say about the event beyond “Hey, racially driven police brutality is bad, doesn’t that make you angry?” The fact that this is almost certain to get award buzz is a little discerning since it’s another in a long line of Oscar-buzz dramas about the plight of the African American community to come through after the Academy ran out of Holocaust movies, and even then, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with them if they weren’t the only movies about the black experience to get award buzz. That’s why Moonlight was such a breath of fresh air. That’s why people are excited for Black Panther. Granted, I’m the probably the least qualified person to talk about this kind of thing, and I understand why it’s so important for these stories to be told, but a little variety and diversity never hurt anyone.

The movie also has its pacing issues. Bigelow does her best to tame Boal’s screenplay into something digestible, but even then, we’re still left with a 143-minute film that drags its feet in the last 20 minutes, and with a movie as ruthlessly punishing as this one, especially one that doesn’t focus nearly enough on its characters as the brutalism they inflict/endure, that runtime does not work in its favor.

Overall, Detroit is a gripping, relentlessly brutal portrayal of a harrowing situation that wares away at your soul, but doesn’t leave you with enough in the end to make the masochism worth it. It’s good that this story is finally being told, but I wish there was more to it than just outrage.

7/10