1992
Let us add “1992” on the list of movies which has the right intention but ruined by the audience. Taking place on April 29th, 1992 the day of the Rodney King verdict, this is rather an unpretentious film, which seeks to juxtapose its heist thriller plot with the violent ethnic background. It stars Tyrese Gibson as a single parent, Mercer who’s looking out for his son Antoine (Christopher Ammanuel) only to offend a robbery in motion headed by Lowell (now deceased Ray Liotta) and his gang. There is excess of gun shooting, chasing of the motor vehicles, dramatics, a measure of both moral values and bitter experiences but on the action crack or the socio-political perspective this film is not changing the status quo.
Ariel Vromen’s film doesn’t lack of references though, and from such a distance 1992 appears to be a slightly more tolerable variation of Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ and John Carpenter’s ‘Assault on Precinct 13,’ yet still an inferior combo. It sets a single night framework with a premise that can make the black lead do just about anything to ensure she survives the night be it violence or putting down her rage.
But while there are certain thrills achieved from its nuts and bolts construction, this movie is the kind that you want to see work around its comfortably clichéd genre elements and focus more on its supposedly complicated father-son relationships which it first pitches.
Those dynamics, in a by the numbers script co-penned by Vromen and Sascha Penn, come in two forms. The first arises between Mercer and Antoine. The former was released from the pen six months ago, he is trying not to revisit his past ways by avoiding the gang life, and working as a maintainer in a plant. Of course, Mercer is not for Antoine becoming a criminal. So he makes the teenager, much to Antoine’s cries of being metaphorically caged by his father, go straight home after school. Another strained father-son bond in the movie is that of Riggin Bigby (Scott Eastwood) and his father Lowell. It is Riggin who hatches a scheme that is the ultimate get rich quick idea that involves Lowell’s gang robbing Mercer’s plant that has $10 million worth of platinum. The perpetrators feel the upheaval that follows the verdict of the Rodney King case would cover their tracks.
It is abundantly clear from this two threads that Mercer and Antoine share a much more intense bond.
The images capture us to the drama and excitement of the movies from the ‘hood’ genre and the shadiest neighborhoods in America. There was never a peaceful moment when Mercer was not causing a ruckus in the area. In the beginning of the movie, Gibson has no reactions as if any response on his part would lead to conflicts and chaos. His body language and posture particularly the way he has to hunch his body in his uncomfortably oversized working jumpsuit is equally telling. This is the journey of a man who is striving to be the better version of himself. When Antoine is throwing timber after the verdict and Mercer is striking a balance with warm acquiescence, there is an exciting volatility between them two. Or bring it about more commonplace circumstances, so often as, for example, an overcrowded police blockade at a road junction.
This makes it necessary for each of the fathers in these circumstances to feel disappointed in the connection they share with their kids. We feel that Riggin’s exhaustion from cooperating with his father and the bunch of crooks is palpable. Riggin is also seen in want to rescue his younger, more compassionate sibling from the clutches of Lowell. Other than that the narrative seems to just, like, end.
Indeed, there are only a few scenes with Liotta and Eastwood and perhaps this was a limitation that was beyond the control of Vromen. The reasons behind Riggin’s hatred for Lowell, and vice versa, are still a mystery. The audience don’t have much of a perception of Lowell either. Liotta seems to be reading off a few lines he has mastered but they are not linking to form a fully formed person. He is just a brute and a monster, nothing more.
Intriguingly enough, these two families do not cross paths as soon as you would expect them to. In fact, it takes Antoine and Mercer over 60 minutes of the film to come across Big Lowe’s crew about whom by that time a robbery had already taken place. Regardless, the action shifts as it now becomes a chase thriller with Antoine and Mercer evading the murderous plots of their adversary. Although, more often than not, action takes place in these shots, the movie from a strange perspective, seems to be speeding up. It creates no tension to watch Mercer wrestle with members of Lowell’s faction. There may be one being it’s all footage cut at the last minute and so the enjoyment of rivalries and vendettas that are constructed over the entire picture just dies? Or perhaps the reason is that the blocking of these shots is rather basic skill?
In any case, “1992” does not wear its elements of the genre very well.
Even in the edit, it seems to falter, for instance, in the awkward use of archival images from the Los Angeles riot. Vromen is torn whether to show those images over the television which is often used in the background of the composition or whether to treat it as a docu-drama. The score seems to be out of harmony with the subject opting for syncopated jazz music in a picture which is way too hot and way too dirty to be so bass heavy.
Still, one cannot turn their back on this source entirely. It is however evident where two Black men in the film avoid white criminals and in the films outside world white people are avoiding Black protestors. There is also the presence of discontent violence that Mercer and Antoine share which the film captures. And Liotta, whose last completed picture is this one, is a fine addition. You only hope that those elements were all able to come together in a film that could instead rely on its human elements and explore drama in the development between those characters as opposed to substandard visual features in an ordinary social movie.
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