Detroit - Review

Detroit

From the Academy Award winning Director Kathryn Bigelow of “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty”, she comes states side to offer her latest effort simply “Detroit”. A gripping true story of one of the darkest moments during the civil unrest that rocked Detroit.

In the summer of 1967, rioting and civil unrest starts to tear apart the city of Detroit. Two days later, a report of gunshots prompts the Detroit Police Department, the Michigan State Police and the Michigan Army National Guard to search and seize an annex of the nearby Algiers Motel. Several policemen start to flout procedure by forcefully and viciously interrogating guests to get a confession. By the end of the night, three unarmed African American men are gunned down – shot in the back while several others are brutally beaten.

REVIEW: With a running time of 2:24, “Detroit” tries to make the large case throughout the entire film that there was a moral injustice done against the three victims as well as the entire African American community that summer, which in and of itself is not hard to reenact. The film clearly draws the lines where one side of the human equation has the guns and badges and the other side of the human equation are constantly fearing for their lives while being beaten, perpetually threaten with guns and frequently called derogatory names as casually as putting out a cigarette with the tip of one’s shoe. So, in that respect, Bigelow can claim mission accomplished, job well done in her “Detroit”.

But while her portrayal of that injustice at times were glaringly powerful and even comparatively speaking eerily similar - current to recent events we all have heard about in the news, Bigelow's attention to just the injustice stops the film from being emotionally probative to eventually feeling only like an exercise in just how numbing and exhausting she can make the audience feel by the Detroit police perpetually asking the same question of “where is the gun is" over and over and over and over again while simultaneously engaging in brutality and murder. The result is the films starts to flounder under the flawed weight of watching teenagers only just trying to survive the entire night by uniformed licensed invaders with the authority of their badges and guns with nonstop racial torture.

Don’t get me wrong “Detroit” has some maddening, harrowing and blistering moments where you skin will boil with anger, but what’s missing is the agility to provide much larger and more in depth emotional narratives of how all of these people were something other than human criminals verses helpless victims. We see plenty of suffering and evil, plenty of fear and lying, but nothing much beyond those attributes to bring the story to some full circle of understanding. 

Still, “Detroit’ is definitely worth seeing and I have a sense it could be in the running for a Best Picture Nomination (maybe). It is excruciatingly and dreadfully tense to watch, as well also very necessary for many people today to see, especially for those who are under the age of 50.

As a whole the film encapsulates a unique period of time in recent American history where certain groups of people, people of color to be specific, may have been born in the United States. They may have been educated and gotten a good job in the United States. They may have been married and had children in the United States. They may even have become very old and died in the United States. And yet even with a detailed description such as this of what sounds on paper like the atypical “good American life” with the constitutional guaranteed protected words,…………………..  “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”…………….I wonder, for those who lived through that hot 1967 summer night; that awful tortuous and murderous night, do they still wonder all these years later if they were ever truly, fully accepted as Americans in the United States.

3.75 Stars