16 Blocks
(Theatrical Film Review)
Stars: Bruce Willis, Mos Def, David Morse
Director: Richard Donner
Critic's rating: 3 out of 10
Review by Chuck O'Leary
Bruce Willis and journeyman director Richard Donner have both had
erratic, hit-or-miss careers. The two, unfortunately, have finally gotten
together for a big miss called 16 Blocks.
Playing like a stupid cross between Narrow Margin
and The Gauntlet, 16 Blocks starts out
promisingly enough. Willis plays a veteran police detective on the
NYPD who's gone to seed. His name is Jack Mosley, a loner whose
alcoholism has become so notorious within the department that's he's now
relegated to running errands.
As anyone who saw In Country, The Last
Boy Scout and Last Man Standing knows, Willis
is at his best playing burnouts who've lost all hope. And he's
again quite effective in the opening scenes of 16 Blocks.
Too bad Richard Wenk's idiotic screenplay and Donner's sloppy,
uninspired direction quickly let him down.
The film begins around 8 a.m. with the depressed, hard-drinking
Mosley getting assigned the apparently easy task of escorting a
witness from the station house to the courthouse 16 city blocks away. The
witness is a young black man with a long criminal record named Eddie Bunker (Mos
Def), whose inability to stop talking immediately grates on the hungover
Mosley's nerves.
The trip starts with Mosley driving Eddie across town, but when
Mosley stops for a bottle of booze, and an assassination attempt is made on
Eddie, what starts out as a mundane errand suddenly turns perilous. Turns out Eddie is scheduled to testify at
10 a.m. against a group of crooked cops from Mosley's department, including
Mosley's former partner, Frank Nugent (David Morse). They want Eddie
out of the way, and never figured on Mosley turning righteous.
The tag line for the film reads "1 Witness...118
Minutes..." although the film's actual running time is about 100
minutes. Thanks for small favors. Sounds like somebody clipped an
entire reel, but it still feels protracted.
The rest of 16 Blocks is a collection of standard
stalk-and-chase clichés with Mosley and Eddie on foot, and, for a time, on
a public bus, narrowly eluding Nugent and his cohorts. Eddie reveals
that he dreams of opening his own bakery in Seattle, and Eddie's motto
"people can change" becomes the none-too-subtle theme of the
movie. Anybody see a birthday cake in Mosley's future?
Contrived to an excruciating degree and mawkishly
emotional, 16 Blocks is a manufactured and predictable
action-thriller that conveniently forgets all logic. Despite being
bleary-eyed, hungover and walking with a limp, watch how fast Mosley turns
into a Die Hard-style action hero with perfect aim once
his charge is threatened.
And as the witness with a high-pitched voice that never stops
running, hip-hop star Mos Def gives one of the most annoying performances since
Joe Pesci first played motor-mouthed accountant Leo Getz in another Donner
film, Lethal Weapon 2. Def is so irritating that you'll
be rooting for the crooked cops to take him out just so you won't have to hear
him anymore.
While this probably wasn't Willis' intention, like last year's
horrendous remake of Assault on Precinct 13, 16 Blocks
is the latest Hollywood movie that ends up denigrating the police and pandering
to the lowest common denominator by making a minority criminal sympathetic and
having him protected by a lone honest white cop, who's clearly the
exception and not the rule. How fitting it is to release a
movie that inadvertently demonizes cops -- ordinary men and women who risk
their lives every day -- on a weekend where Hollywood has its annual
festival of narcissism, the Academy Awards. As one of the rare
conservatives in today's Hollywood, Willis should know better.
