Tense, taut, and deeply gripping writer/director John Swab’s dramatic drug cartel/fentanyl trade crime thriller “King Ivory” is a terrific surprise from the Venice Film Festival’s Orrizonti Extras section. Reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s Academy Award-winning drug trafficking thriller, “Traffic,” though rougher and slightly more condensed in scope, “King Ivory”— one of the many street slang monikers for fentanyl— centers on the ongoing war on drugs, the way it affects many different communities and lives, and the hard reality struggle to make even a tiny dent in this conflict. Like “Traffic,” it’s multi-faceted, offering many perspectives, and is primarily seen through the lens of law enforcement, but superficial similarities end there. Swab makes it his own muscular, lean, and mean beast with a visceral immediacy pulsing throughout.
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Centering around the drug trade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the film’s opening title cards set up the current context and climate: the Mexican cartels have been decentralized, leaving only two major organizations left, fentanyl is flooding in from Europe, and dozens of new smaller groups, harder to track, have popped up around the country helping further spread this scourge. Fentanyl is deadly and insidious, too, much more potent than heroin and much harder to track at the border. Addiction and overdoses are soaring, and drug-related crime is steadily rising.
Swab’s film sets up a complex web of seemingly distinct narratives that elegantly clash and collide later in the drama like disparate bomb fuses that have been lit, all racing towards the same explosive device.
One thread finds George “Smiley” Greene (Ben Foster), a wire-y Irish mob criminal, who uses a tracheotomy speaking valve to talk in his final days of incarceration. He’s also connected to the Indian Brotherhood gang and its War Chief Holt Lightfeather (Graham Greene), a stoic Native American prisoner sentenced to a life who runs the entire Tulsa drug trade from his cell.
Elsewhere, Layne West (James Badge Dale) and his partner Ty Grady (George Carroll), play highly proficient Tulsa law enforcement drug cops who make big busts, take down gangsters in ruthlessly efficient raids and work closely with FBI counterpart, Beatty (Rory Cochrane).
The last central thread revolves around Ramón Garza (Michael Mando), a local cartel drug runner and lieutenant bringing in millions of dollars of fentanyl in from Mexico, who’s also running a side hustle of sneaking in migrants and illegals into the country while he’s on the way back to Oklahoma.
And this is where all narrative strands begin to converge. On his way back from Mexico hauling immigrants, Garza and his partner accidentally kill a large group of migrants stowed away in their ten-wheeler freight truck; everyone perishing from a lack of oxygen save one boy, who Garza eventually enlists into his drug-running operation. In the end, the scene of the crime found by West and Grady is littered with bodies, including Garcia’s partner, who he murders for trying to run away with the drugs after both men panicked from the tragedy they caused.
With Foster’s Smiley back on the street and taking orders from Big Chief and Garcia being part of a rival drug trade, a war is brewing, but most importantly, the Tulsa cops have both men in their sights.
From there, “King Ivory” takes a micro and macro view of Tulsa’s fentanyl epidemic and people within it, tracking the personal consequences of this story—like West’s family, his new wife, and his rebellious teenage son who is slowly getting hooked on fentanyl right under his own nose.
Smiley has a community waiting for him: his mom, Ginger (Melissa Leo), and his wayward, drugged-out uncle, Mickey Green (Ritchie Coster), who begins to become a liability. West’s son’s addiction becomes worse and more harrowing, and Lago (David De La Barcena), the sole surviving Mexican migrant teen taken under Garza’s wing, quickly realizes just how utterly disposable he is. There are few happy endings here and Swab’s film is unapologetic about the harsh realities.
While never flashy, “King Ivory” is intense and engaging nonetheless; thanks to its cinematic precision and power of observation, excellent cast, and overall economy, there’s absolutely no fat on the bone here.
Already raw and brawny, cinematographer Will Stone lends the film an even greater authenticity with a gritty sheen and a run-and-gun handheld approach to many scenes that offer that nervy sense of anxious gut intuitiveness that law enforcement is forced to make in dangerous situations. The film also features an objective, almost voyeuristic style in that it seems to cast no judgment on any of the characters. And while subtle, even a faint light of empathy for everyone involved peers through the darkness.
James Badge Dale is routinely excellent and underrated, and he aces his tough but compassionate and loyal cop and family man character. He’s the type of police who is all business on the job and surprisingly empathetic at home, especially during the brewing battle between his son and wife. No nonsense and man on a mission, it’s refreshing for “King Ivory” to subvert the typical dedicated drug cop character who’s usually obsessive and a disaster in every aspect of his life beyond work.
Michael Mando also shines as the drug runner Garcia, ruthless when he needs to be but human enough to understand that a truck full of dead migrants is a heartbreaking catastrophe. Also habitually compelling, Ben Foster’s dedicated approach also pays off. There are no other major stars in this movie, but every actor is persuasively captivating in their respective roles.
Having directed “J Candy Land” (2022) and “Body Brokers” (2021), filmmaker John Swab remains something of an unknown quality, but the exacting and ferocity of “King Ivory” deserves to ascend him to a higher tier on the filmmakers to watch list. “King Ivory” is bold, formed as a starker Michael Mann film and unstylized, nothing glamorized, and featuring no score or music other than a diegetic club or car radio sounds. This gambit—the pure and unvarnished approach doesn’t work for all filmmakers who need music to guide their viewers emotionally—but for Swab’s trenchant film, chiseled and resolute, much like his main cop protagonist, it’s a perfect choice.
Ultimately, “King Ivory” might be the “Chinatown” of drug cartel movies insofar as futility is a similar key grim theme. Law enforcement does its best, but it’s an impossible war to properly fight, let alone win. As Holt warns West during a prison visit, “The cartels want your kids, the next generation, who want what is new, and fentanyl is new.” It’s bleak and uncompromising, but it’s a hell of an experience. [B+/A-]
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