More violence in the hood, Big Easy style

Okay, I guess this is as good a reason to make a film as any other. Coming up on the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina we have a crime-in-the-hood novella set in the battered and besieged Lower 9^th Ward of New Orleans, during and in the immediate aftermath of the devastating – and highly controversial in terms of emergency response – 2005 tropical storm. Of course, that’s a good hook for the story as well. The film, Cut Throat City by RZA (rapper and producer Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) opens at various (stateside) theatres on Friday. (UPDATE July 23: Now re-scheduled TBA in August.). The set-up is this. An aspiring graphic novelist, Blink (Shameik Moore) has a bright future ahead of him as a legitimate artist. He marries and all appears as if he’ll go on the straight and narrow. However, the fact he and his new wife Demyra (Kat Graham) can’t get FEMA money because their neighborhood wasn’t devastated enough, leads him back to his homies and to a major heist. The story is pretty pro forma, with Blink and his foursome lamenting their lives and how they have been screwed over by the government. “Hurricanes and shit..they’ve been using them for years to kill black people,” the only difference is that hurricanes now are also named after blacks. But Blink’s gang is small fry in the Lower 9th crime hierarchy. Their heist goes sideways and they have to pay, on the run from both the cops and their overlord, a very nasty ‘Cousin’ Bass (Tip ‘Til’ Harris), who sics mean varmints on miscreants’ private parts. Politics aside this is a pretty typical “hood” movie, with script banter of the “N” word de rigueur and all manner of slice ‘em and dice ‘em gang talk. There is redemption, yes, but I’m not sure everyone would want to forage through the tranches of violence to get there. However, the director should be congratulated for a very inventive ending (don’t leave when the credits start!). Ethan Hawke has a small role as ex-police corrupt city councilor Jackson Symms. I think the best performance is by Eiza González as Det. Valencia – no nonsense and unflappable. Given the aftermath of the recent mass protests and holocaust of rioting in the wake of the George Floyd death, I kept looking for film resonances. But, of course, the picture was made before this. Still, the NOPD is portrayed as virtually all white with one racist overture. And, in this Defund the Police moment, one cop informer poignantly tells Valencia, “They let them all go. Day One. Now we’ll get more criminals, more violence, less intelligence, less cops.”