‘Red, White and Blue’ Review: John Boyega Is The Best He’s Ever Been In Steve McQueen’s True-Life Drama

When John Boyega‘s characters says he wants to join the force (meaning the police force) in Red, White and Blue—which premiered virtually at New York Film Festival this weekend as part of Steve McQueen‘s Small Axe anthology—McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland couldn’t resist a Jedi joke. But the Star Wars superstar is given far more room to highlight his talents in this 78-minute true-life drama than he ever had in a galaxy far, far away.

Red, White and Blue will be the fifth and final installment of McQueen’s upcoming film anthology series, which will roll out on a weekly basis on Amazon Prime Video beginning November 20. Three of the five Small Axe films—Lover’s Rock; Mangrove; and now Red, White and Blue—premiered virtually at New York Film Festival this month. Each episode is a full-length, stand-alone film, though all share a common theme: the West Indian experience in London between the years 1968-1985. Through each film, you get a snapshot of a community, which, when added together, make for a broader panoramic. Lover’s Rock was a dreamy slice-of-life taking place over one night at a reggae house party in 1980; Mangrove, a bleak courthouse drama about protestors who are wrongly charged with inciting riots in 1970.

Red, White and Blue zeroes in on the year 1983 to tell the true story of Leroy Logan, who was a highly respected superintendent in the Metropolitan police for three decades and co-founded the National Black Police Association. (Today the real Logan has his own book, Closing Ranks, and you can follow him on Twitter.) Boyega depicts Logan in his journey to that role, beginning as a young forensic scientist working late nights in the lab. After his Jamaican immigrant father is assaulted at the hands of two white policemen for doing nothing more than parking his truck on the side of the road, Logan decides to apply to become a policeman himself. It’s a secret desire he’s always had, despite his father’s contempt for law enforcement, but now Logan is fueled by a new goal: address police racism from the inside. Logan’s father, played by the formidable Steve Toussaint, has a hard time seeing it that way. 

He’s not the only one. Logan’s neighbors call him a traitor when they see him walking down the street in uniform. Despite the fact that Logan is an exemplary recruit who passed his physical and written exams with flying colors, he’s ostracized by his white colleagues, whose behavior escalates from pointed looks to scrawling racial slurs on Logan’s locker. Logan’s only ally on the force, a young recruit of South Asian descent, eventually quits, and Logan is left utterly alone in what seems like an impossible battle.

Like Lover’s Rock and Mangrove; Red, White and Blue is gorgeous to look at. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, who shot the entire Small Axe anthology, expertly mixes tracking shots with point-of-view set-ups, so you often feel like a voyeur, spying on the characters from behind the locker room wall or through the front window of a car. The muted color palette gives you the feel of the period without any need for excessive pop culture references to ’80s music or celebrities. These characters are living in the now, not in a decade in our collective memory. But most striking is Boyega’s performance as Logan, as he subtly transforms from optimistic and fun-loving at the start to serious and stern by the film’s end. He commands the screen, and you’re left with no doubt that this man will grow into one of the most distinguished officers the Metropolitan Police Force has ever seen. If nothing else, Red, White and Blue is a good indication of where Boyega is headed for in his post-Star Wars career. Even if this year’s not his year for an Oscar nomination, it feels like only a matter of time.

McQueen originally conceived of Small Axe as a series compromised of TV-length episodes rather than feature films, and there is an episodic feel to Red, White and Blue. This is not a grand-scale epic like McQueen 2013 Best Picture winner, 12 Years a Slave, nor is it an edge-of-your-seat thriller like his 2018 heist flick, Widows. You get a quick taste of the latter when Logan is left by his racist colleagues to apprehend a suspect without back-up. The chase scene through a warehouse factory is wonderfully shot—a single long take that is mesmerizing in the way it builds tension and suspense, but just when things are getting good, the action is cut short, and the scene ends. In another film that might be the midpoint, but in Red, White and Blue it’s the climax.

When the film ends, you’re left feeling a teensy bit short-changed. The script neither validates nor denounces Logan’s decision to join the very people who assaulted his father; it has no point of view. But perhaps that’s the point of the anthology series—simply presenting the experiences of Black Londoners without judgment, and without hyperbole. Each Small Axe film is a piece of that, and we don’t yet have all the pieces to add up to a whole.

Red, White and Blue will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on December 18.

Where to watch Red, White, and Blue