Stream It or Skip It: ‘21 Bridges’ on Showtime, a Chadwick Boseman Vehicle You’ll Wish Was Better

A lot has happened between the time 21 Bridges‘ late 2019 theatrical debut and its current Showtime streaming debut. Star Chadwick Boseman‘s death after a private four-year battle with colon cancer still has us reeling with grief. And in the midst of civil strife tied to (too many) instances of police brutality, the movie’s good-cops-and-bad-cops subject matter unintentionally hits a few sour notes.

21 BRIDGES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Thirteen-year-old Andre Davis (Christian Isaiah) sits at his father’s funeral. He was a cop, killed on the job. A man in dress blues puts his hand on Andre’s shoulder to comfort him. Nineteen years later, internal affairs officials have Andre (Boseman) under the lamp. He’s an NYC detective with a rep for gunning down cop killers. They all drew first, he insists — and now they’re all dead. Is he above-board righteous or exacting justice with no judge or jury? Hard to tell.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, two grunts gear up with masks and machine guns for a robbery. They’re expecting 30 kilos of coke, but find 300, uncut. Right: WTF. They can’t even fit that much in the trunk. Strange then, how the cops show up without guns drawn and politely knocking. Their arrival appears coincidental. Hmm. But bullets fly soon enough. Michael (Stephan James) might have been game for trying to escape or putting his hands up, but Ray (Taylor Kitsch) is a stone psycho. Soon enough, seven cops are dead and one is left to die.

This looks like a job for you-know-who. Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons) pairs Andre with Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) and fends off the FBI so the NYPD can take care of their own. Andre orders a lockdown of the entire island of Manhattan — if you’re not sure how many bridges it has, just read the movie title — so he can run down these SOBs. It’s 1 a.m. He has ’til 5. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Any number of modestly entertaining genre exercises that didn’t challenge Denzel Washington much, but whose performance nevertheless elevated them to watchable status: Out of Time, Safe House, The Equalizer, etc.

Performance Worth Watching: This isn’t 42, Black Panther or Da 5 Bloods — far from it. But if you’re not watching this for Boseman, you’re probably not watching it at all.

Memorable Dialogue: A line that seems written precisely for J.K. Simmons to deliver: “The mayor shits on us every chance he gets. The f—in’ guy eats pizza with a fork.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So the killer of cop killers learns that maybe some cops aren’t so great. That’s a snaky moral rabbit hole that 21 Bridges doesn’t go down, whether it’s too scared, or unambitious, or merely aiming to be escapism. The escapism argument doesn’t hold water — director Brian Kirk is a solid action director in individual scenes, but he doesn’t nurture the overarching sense of tension the movie needs to be a gripping race-against-time thriller.

The thin screenplay is the likely culprit. It’s the same old oatmeal of many police-corruption movies before it. The Andre character is too slight and opaque for Boseman to even really explore any fine ethical lines; as the end credits roll, we still don’t know if he’s righteous or itchy of trigger finger, just that his father’s death put him on this particular controversial career path. The movie treads a dull line between procedural realism and the type of heightened reality that gives us Wild West gunslingers and other such quasi-meritorious antiheroes (e.g., John Wick), and it lacks the audacious style and the daring visual and narrative choices, of a good, meaty genre flick. It also misses an opportunity to surround the protagonist with colorful supporting characters — Simmons is on autopilot as a quick-with-a-quip cop, and Miller is asked to do little more than grit her teeth.

One can easily argue that the premise is implausible to the point that it frames everything as fiction, but if films don’t reflect some components of our recognizable reality — whether tonal, physical, emotional — they often fail to connect with audiences. That’s why it’s difficult to divorce ourselves from the mixed emotions we feel while watching a film set in modern times where cops shoot first and ask questions later, for any reason. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive; maybe you can decontextualize it better than I can; maybe oversensitivity is a product of our times.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Curiosity and a desire to see Boseman in — sadly, very very sadly — one of his final roles may inspire you to watch 21 Bridges. That’s understandable. It’s how we mourn him. Sure, he’s pretty good in it. Magnetic, thoughtful, intense. But you’ll wish it gave him more to do.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream 21 Bridges