River Runs Red is a 2108 crime drama about a hardened veteran detective, who finds incriminating files on officers and a judge involved in a killing, deciding to take the law into his own hands.
It’s not much of a concession to admit that most movies allow for certain loopholes or lacks in authenticity in order to streamline a story for entertainment, maybe sacrificing a bit of logic or painting characters in broad strokes to simplify things. That’s how it goes. However, in Wes Miller‘s latest thriller River Runs Red, these tactics go to extremes, slapdashing together a pale, uninspired story that completely fails to trigger any sense of reality or investment, despite a few solid turns from the cast.
Charles Coleman (Taye Diggs) is a respected judge, having worked his way up fast from law school (we see a brief flashback of his troubles doing so). He’s married to Eve (Jennifer Tao), a patrol cop and the two have a son name C.J. (Joseph Belk) literally driving to the Academy to begin his own training. Thing is, on the way, he gets stopped by a couple of trigger happy police officers who gun the boy down in a hail of bullets on a routine traffic stop. Protected by the mayor, the investigation goes cold though and a frustrated Coleman turns to his old investigatory partner (John Cusack) for help, bringing in the father (George Lopez) of another victim of a shooting by these cops to bring the pain. Justice will be served.
To a small degree, River Runs Blood might seem contemporary, and supercially feels like it wants to make a statement about the impact of police in society. However, that is quickly abandoned in favor of see-through characters and ultra-contrived moments that offer no weight to a story begging for such. The opening salvo where police officers, Luke Hemsworth and Gianni Capaldi pull over C.J. is inept from the start, these men in uniform making the dumbest choices and about as convincing as a cop in a Burt Reynolds car chase comedy. They set a standard for the rest of the movie.
In the aftermath, one of the of police officers is obligatorily wracked with guilt and can’t pull himself to even be intimate with his wife (even as she joins him in the shower) as the other buys a ticket on the bullet train of racism and hostility to cartoonish effect. Meanwhile, Charles and Eve try to patch their lives together while he turns up the heat and decides revenge is the best course of action. Fine, it’s old hat, stuff we’ve seen countless times before and leads us to an end visible miles ahead. It’s just that the movie never once gives any of it any believability, every scene so saturated with unconvincing dialogue and action, smothered by saccharin music, it loses all its potential for punch.
Cusack comes off best, though is wasted in a script that has most of the cast floundering. The audience, too. While clearly there is a lot here in its premise that takes aim at social injustice and probably hopes to inspire some kind of discourse on what it all means, that all flies out the window early, River Runs Red trying all too hard to be what it isn’t. While some of the cast do their best to carry this to some kind of meaningful end, it’s all for naught. Not recommended.