Overstylized 'Monster' Can't Hide Film's Conventional Core [Review]

Based on a YA novel by Walter Dean Myers, “Monster,” adapted by Radha Blank, Cole Wiley and Janece Shaffer, is a messy, conventional but likeable film that will likely strike a chord with unadventurous moviegoers rather than cinephiles who are used to these kinds of stories by now, most notably in pictures like “The Hurricane,” “The Green Mile,” and “In the Name of the Father.”

The story revolves around Steve Harmon (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a well-mannered, law-abiding Harlem teenager who winds up arrested for his involvement in a robbery and murder at a 7/11. Steve’s middle class parents (Jeffrey Wright and Jennifer Hudson) don’t believe that their son, who is on his way to college after graduating from a prestigious high school, could be involved in the crime. His grades are great, his teachers love him, he doesn’t seem to hang around the “wrong crowd” and he has a loving, attentive girlfriend. What doesn’t help is that Steve was acquainted with the perpetrators James King (Rakim Mayers) and “Bobo” Evans (John David Washington), and spoke to them right before they committed the robbery and the ensuing murder. The prosecutor latches onto this association and during the court case, tries to make the case that Steve is a “monster,” even as the audience sees through flashbacks that this is far from the case.

Directed by Anthony Mandler, “Monster” is no doubt a pertinent and relevant film for our times, but its cliched narrative isn’t anything new, especially coming off of last year’s “Crown Heights” which won the Sundance Audience Award and also dealt with an African-American from New York accused of crimes he did not commit. The film makes the mistake of overtly relying on Steve’s voiceover, which does a disservice to both the audience’s intelligence and renders scenes that are supposed to be poignant, inauthentic. The device also distances us from the story which, by all accounts, is an interesting one, portrayed “Rashomon” style, where different points of view of the same event are shown. But Mandler leaves nothing to chance, and at one point, Steve’s film teacher Mr. Sawicki (a scene-stealing Tim Blake Nelson) actually shows his class the Kurosawa classic, in case you didn’t get the connection.

The good news is that Harrison, who previously shined in “It Comes At Night,” delivers a performance that keeps you invested. His expressive eyes can tell a story all by themselves. This is an instinctive, sensitively rendered turn filled with the subtlest of physical details. He’s the eyes and ears through which we see “Monster” unfold.

Kudos must also go to editor Joe Klotz, whose kinetic, back and forth cutting, consistently shifts between the trial and flashbacks, as he tries to keep up with Mandler’s ambitious vision. This kind of story doesn’t really need overtly-stylized direction, but Mandler is eager to impress. However, sometimes less is more, and his reliance on flashy visuals sees him losing a hold on his characters, most unfortunately the film’s lead, Steve. Mandler’s background before shooting his narrative feature debut was in music videos and commercials, but the ADD-style filmmaking he uses for “Monster” suggests he’s not ready to fully command a two-hour movie. [C]

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