‘Monsters And Men’ Lacks The Complexity Its Story Deserves [Sundance Review]

Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s “Monsters and Men” strives to capture the zeitgeist, tackling police brutality, as three characters, from three different stories, are connected to a shooting which leaves an unarmed black man dead. There’s the eyewitness who captured video of the incident on his phone, the African-American police officer trying to do his job, and a high school student who becomes so moved by the shooting that he turns into a political activist.

Green’s film has three half hour stories to tell, but the problem with such a structure is that you run the risk to not fully developing your characters. That is what happens in “Monsters and Men.” We are given interesting characters, that are put into extraordinary situations, but there’s no payoff. You barely feel like you knew them. It doesn’t help that the film’s message is a little too on-the-nose, and perhaps not addressed with enough complexity.

The film starts off very strong as an African-American man (John David Washington) is inexplicably pulled over by an NYPD officer. The twist here is that the driver turns out to be an undercover cop, and he later mentions to a colleague that this was the sixth time he was pulled over in the last year.

The initial chapter has Manny (Anthony Ramos) filming the shooting death, by a cop, of his friend Big D. Paranoia starts to set into Manny’s world as he feels like he is being followed by the cops who know he has incriminating video evidence on his phone. The fear inside him reaches a fever pitch when discovers his apartment has been broken into by somebody with the intention of finding and retrieving the footage. Pushed to the edge, Manny posts the video on YouTube, and it’s doesn’t take much time for New York’s dailies to pick up on the story. But soon, Manny is arrested on bogus charges, and jailed with ridiculously high bail, leaving his pregnant girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones) to raise their daughter alone. Manny’s chapter is the best of the bunch, but ends so abruptly and with no resolution that you are left scratching your head at the missed opportunity and potential of this story.

The second vignette has the aforementioned black cop (Washington) caught up in the problems his precinct is facing in the aftermath of the shooting of Big D. The internal conflict, a struggle that surely many African-American cops face at the moment when deciding to put on the badge, is at the center of Washington’s story, which has him on the defensive about his career with his friends and family. The conflict is compelling, and the stakes are raised when it’s determined he might have to take the stand in the shooting trial, in which two of his fellow friends and cops are charged, but it’s at this point that Green jumps into the third chapter.

Here we meet Zyrick (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a smart, articulate high-school student that ends up being stopped and frisked by the cops who shot Big D. Zyrick’s future is bright, with a college baseball scholarship, but like many others, he was was disturbed by Manny’s footage, and he starts to become politically active. He joins a group and participates in different protests, inlcuding some that turn violent, and he soon has to face the question: is it worth putting his scholarship at risk for the sake of activism?

“Monsters and Men” is problematic in that it believes it can leave open ended story strands open for us to decide what might happen next, but because the situations are not fully explained and the characters never fully developed, we are left with more questions than answers. There isn’t clarity in Green’s screenplay, which is clearly inspired by the structure of Barry Jenkins‘ “Moonlight,” although his filmmaking  is impressive, using handheld camerawork and a restrained approach that keeps the story compelling. Yet, despite its ambitions, “Monsters and Men” makes its weighty subject matter feels thin and slight. [C]

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