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When the son of a successful judge (Taye Diggs) is killed by two police officers (Luke Hemsworth & Gianni Capaldi) and the system sets them free, a hardened veteran detective (John Cusack) finds some incriminating files on the officers and the judge teams up with another mourning father (George Lopez) to take the law into his own hands.
The problem with a lot of movies today is that they lack originality. When you really think about it, most films are an amalgamation of stories that came before them, as the old saying goes, “there is no new thing under the sun.” All filmmakers take well-worn and tired narratives and at least try to add something new to it. In 1987, director Richard Donner took the hackneyed story of two cops who have to work together and initially hate each other but over time, come to respect and eventually love each other like brothers. Shane Black did a tremendous job writing that script and it became a huge hit, spawning three very successful sequels and a TV series.
The problem with “River Runs Red” is that it thinks it is being smarter than the viewer, it thinks it’s fooling you into believing you are viewing something new and inspiring when in fact, you’re watching a cliché-ridden story that you can easily predict from the opening scene. I really can’t fault the actors too much, they do their best with limited material. The fault here lies with writer/director Wes Miller. He somehow manages to assemble a decent cast including Taye Diggs, John Cusack, George Lopez, and Luke Hemsworth and then wastes their talents in under 100 minutes. If Mr. Miller concentrated more on writing believable characters, authentic dialogue, and conceivable scenarios, people would have a much stronger reaction to his material, instead of wanting to turn the movie off halfway through.
Taye Diggs plays Charles Coleman, Sr., the first and only black judge in the city. His wife Eve (Jennifer Tao), is a police officer and their young son is getting ready to begin his first day at the academy but on the way there, he is pulled over by two trigger-happy cops, Von (Luke Hemsworth) and his partner Rory (Gianni Capaldi), and executed in cold blood, after they assume he was reaching for a gun, when in reality, he was reaching for his drivers license. They plant a gun and drugs in his car as evidence and this exonerates them and they walk free. Eve quits the police force and constantly nags Charles to do the right thing and through an old cop friend of his, Horace (John Cusack), who used to work in Internal Affairs, he discovers that the two cops who killed his son, shot and murdered another young man a few years earlier, and walked away from that scenario too. Charles tracks down the father of the murdered man, Javier (George Lopez), and together, they pursue the cops who took their son’s lives so they can exact retribution.
The acting, for the most part, is above par but both Jennifer Tao, the grieving mother, and Gianni Capaldi, the slimy, cigar-chomping, racist cop, both fall flat on their faces and prove that many of the inanimate objects which surround them, such as cups, cars, guns, and houses, are capable of showing more emotion than both of them combined. During moments where Eve is supposed to be grief-stricken, she instead stares offscreen, trying to spout convincing, impassioned speeches, which are supposed to motivate her husband to seek revenge, but instead, cause the viewer to roll their eyes to the point of exhaustion. Gianni Capaldi, the one half of the crooked cop duo, constantly looks dirty, complete with greasy, long, unkempt hair, and along with his incessant eye-squinting, should have worn an eye patch, just so that the audience wouldn’t mistake him for a good guy. Both of these characters manage to bring what little relevance there is in the film and throw it out the window.
This movie was obviously made as a result of the ongoing number of black men in America who have been unjustly shot and killed by white cops who then walked free but here, it feels much more like an exercise in futility rather than a straight-up story about a father seeking justice, who, by the end, ends up no better the men who murdered his son. While the script was wholly unoriginal, there was plenty of wiggle room to add new story and character arcs but director Wes Miller seemed content to settle for mediocrity. What a shame.
Available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray & DVD December 11th
