SLIFF Review – BLACK COP

BLACK COP screens Sunday, November 5th at 8:30pm at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival.  Writer and Director Corey Bowles will be in attendance. Ticket information can be found HERE.

It’s not easy being a black cop: Your community doesn’t trust you, your colleagues are wary of you, and everyone assumes you hate NWA. And when the world is on edge waiting for a grand-jury verdict on a high-profile police case involving an unarmed youth, all eyes are on you. For one black cop (Ronnie Rowe), who’s already pulled between duty and moral obligation, the situation only worsens when he is profiled by his colleagues when off-duty. Nearly killed by his fellow cops, he’s finally pushed over the edge. Armed with the power of his badge, stoked by an antagonizing radio show, and motivated by some good old-fashioned rage, he embarks on a vendetta, targeting the community that justifies his colleagues. A hyperactive satire by Cory Bowles — a cast member and frequent director of the popular Netflix series “Trailer Park Boys” — “Black Cop” provocatively explores the charged intersection of race, law enforcement, and social media.

Review of BLACK COP by Stephen Tronicek:

BLACK COP is the most ferociously crafted film you will see at the film festival this year and that distinction is one that can only be made with the most positives of lights. Its story is inherently political and inherently terrifying, forcing the audience to see the hostilities that so many people are shown, just because of the way that they look. Some may call its events exaggerated, some may call its story racist itself, but it seems to an audience of a white male (which I am) the only way to truly explore this issue with any type of meaningful bite is to provide an authentic portrait of hostilities and see who walks away from it saying that it is exaggeration and who walks away from it seeing the truth. I fall down hard on the truth side. BLACK COP is about an African American cop, who noticing the wrongful hostilities that are being inflicted on his community, snaps and decides to, for one day, treat white people the way that the white officers around him often treat black people. This leads to some interesting events as the African American cop starts to target and inflict violence on the white people around him.

Now, to a lot of people, this might sound like a parable of racism against white people, but that misses the point of the entire film. Black Cop concerns itself with switching the status quo in order to explore how this status quo can be harmful to a community. The cop at the center of the film is not particularly in the right, but there is truth to the way he’s automatically assuming aggressiveness from the people around him. He’s not being polite, he’s just accepting the people he attacks are bad, and acting as he sees others act. We know his actions aren’t right and therefore we know that the real world mirror of his actions aren’t right. This makes BLACK COP especially hard to review because as a white person, I can’t begin to understand the African American experience in America. I do know one thing though. I do know that the hostilities shown to the victims of this cop are wrong and in that, I know that the hostilities mirroring his hostilities at the hands of white officers are wrong. As for the filmmaking and acting it is as ferocious and agonizing as the subject matter, almost in itself asking what we’re supposed to do with all this unneeded violence. BLACK COP tells us that violence is not the answer. It can only beget more violence, but sometimes the only way to tell an ignorant audience about it is to force them to confront it head-on.