River Runs red

Locations
Call Number: DVD Action River
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Title from sell sheet.
Originally released as a motion picture in 2018.
Wide screen.
Taye Diggs, John Cusack, George Lopez, Luke Hemsworth, Gianni Capaldi.
When the son of a successful judge is killed by two police officers and the system sets them free, a hardened veteran detective finds some incriminating files on the officers and the judge teams up with another mourning father to take the law into their own hands.
DVD, wide screen.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

utterly worthless B-movie. Unwatchable. submitted by Tassos on April 6, 2019, 9:10am utterly worthless B-movie. Unwatchable.

Posterized plot and characters give an old story an uncomfortable, edgy angle submitted by Morty on April 19, 2019, 8:15am Posterization in graphics provides hard edges between colors, instead of blending them together when they meet. Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe series is a famous example.

That's what Wes Miller does with both the plot and the characters in this eye-for-an-eye, revenge film. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, another revenge film, has stark moments, like the one in which Will Munny says "now I've come to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to Ned," but it's not like that for the entire 131 minutes.

Here, there is little if any "gray," ever. For example, women accuse their husbands of being cowards for not seeking revenge, or for doing "wrong" instead of "right," and in one such exchange, the light on the characters' faces as they argue throws harsh, sharp-edged shadows that mirror the starkness of the "us-versus-them," "right-versus-wrong" positions they're taking.

When the mother of the slain boy slaps the face of the policeman who killed him, he gives her a sneer worthy of Snidely Whiplash, the villain in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. She's right, he's wrong; she's good, he's bad. He's even wearing a dark cowboy hat throughout the entire movie.

I don't watch films for entertainment; I watch them to see how the story is told, and from that perspective, this is an interesting, edgy angle on an old subject that was well worth watching.