When a routine traffic stop results in the unexplained, grisly death of her colleague, a cop (Mary J. Blige) realizes footage of the incident will play for her eyes only. As the attacks mount, she races to understand the supernatural force behind them.
I just need to get this out of the way: Mary J. Blige is not a strong actor. Even though “Body Cam” is labeled a horror film, there are some elements that require her character to be distraught as she just lost her young son in a drowning accident and unfortunately, these scenes do not work. Ms. Blige is a phenomenal singer-songwriter and even though she has been acting for some years now, starting out on “The Jamie Foxx Show” and appearing in such titles as “Rock of Ages” and “Black Nativity,” when it comes to emotionally-charged scenes, she just can’t pull it off. Had the filmmakers hired someone like Halle Berry, Sanaa Lathan, or Regina Hall, they would have infused the few poignant scenes throughout with a degree of sincerity and believability, something Ms. Blige sadly could not set in motion.
In “Body Cam,” Ms. Blige plays Renee Lomito-Smith, a Louisiana police officer who recently lost her son in a tragic accident. After taking some time off to grieve, she is back on the force and partnered with a young rookie named Danny Holledge (Nat Wolff). Things are fine for a while until a fellow officer is found mutilated after having pulled over a suspicious green van with no license plates. When they arrive on the scene, Danny explores the surrounding area and Renee looks through the officer’s dashcam footage, only to be horrified when she sees him tossed through the air by an unseen force. When the department asks her what she found, she explains what she saw on the footage but is informed that the dashcam and the car itself were fried in a freak accident. A few days later, two officers spot the green van outside a convenience store and when they make their way inside, they approach the driver of the van, a young woman but when two thieves try to rob the place, everyone is killed, except for the woman, who manages to escape.
Renee and Danny descend on the bloody scene and realize that the two cops and the store clerk were shot dead while the two thieves were gruesomely murdered. Renee finds a cell phone on the ground and hides it in her pocket. Later on at home, while looking at the footage, she sees one of the victims being lifted into the air while a mysterious figure looms in the background, only to instantly disappear. As she digs deeper, she stumbles upon a cover-up involving the shooting death of a young black boy and when Danny takes his own life and leaves behind a flash drive for Renee, showing what happened the night of the shooting through his body cam footage, she decides to confront the officers responsible. When things quickly go south and they threaten to kill her if she tries to expose them, the mysterious entity that she saw in the video footage appears and takes matters into its own hands.
Although the movie was shot in 2018, the use of excessive force by the white cops against the young black boy who then try to cover it up comes at a time when riots and protests are engulfing the US for the exact same use of brute force by various police departments across the country. The film, overall, tries to keep the storyline believable, utilizing the aforementioned dramatic trope so that it stays fresh in your mind but trying to add an element of the supernatural to such a realistic story, one that is happening more and more in real life, almost feels disrespectful. As I stated earlier, the movie was made two years ago, before the recent events of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor and while the filmmakers are not at fault here, some might see it as adding unnecessary fuel to the fire. Had this been released last year, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of a stir because it is purely fiction, it’s just unfortunate its release date coincides with what’s going on in the world today.
Available on DVD, Digital, and On-Demand July 14th
