“Cut Throat City” could have been the title of a 1970s exploitation picture or a film noir from the 1940s—the kind where characters get trapped in a web of conflicting loyalties and die there. It could also be the title ofa muckraking documentary about a big city where life is cheap and everything else is expensive. This impressivethird featurefrom musician-record producer RZA, about four young Black men in New Orleans who become armed robbers,operates in all three modes at once.
The result is a sprawling urban drama with eruptions of violence. Itprovides the intrigue that fans want from the heistgenre while anchoring its twists indetails about life in New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina—a disaster thatwas bungled by every level of government, and treated by corporations and real estate companies as a pretextto gentrify the city and drive out as many poor Black people as possible. Working from a screenplay byPaul Cuschieri, RZA and his collaborators take theirsweet timebuilding out supporting characters, letting themthem talkabout systemic racism, capitalism, gentrification, and the relationship between art and life, on top of who owes whom and what’ll happen if they don’t pay up.
The film’s main character, a drug dealer and aspiringcomic book artistBlink (Shameik Moore), is our guide through a story that immediately announces itself as something more than a cinematiccash grab. The first third of “Cut Throat City”is an account of young men struggling to make their way in a harsh world that feels heightened but not unreal.The prologue is setbefore Katrina makes landfall.Blink gets married to his girlfriend Demeyra (Kat Graham), a single mom with anadorable young son. Blink’s pal Andre (Denzel Whitaker), a jazz musician, plays trumpet during the couple’s first dance. We meet Miracle (Demetrius Shipp, Jr.), a pride-driven hothead, and Junior (Keean Johnson), who loves his attack-trained dog more than he loves most people.RZA andCuschieri build out the core characters’ environment in short scenes that pack a lot of information into a few lines and gestures. By the time the levees break we’re fully invested, even though we know from the movie’s description that these guys aren’t going to end up volunteering for the Red Cross.
Blink, Miracle, Andre, and Junior live in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, a predominantly poor, Black neighborhood that was treated as an afterthought by the city even before the flood waters rose. They’re street-level drug dealers, working territory ruled byCousin Bass (rapper-producer-actorTI, in an indelible supporting performance that holds its own against heavy-hitting character actors). A sense of frustration and depression runs beneath every deal.Blink and companywould gladly do something else if it paid as much as dealing. But guys like these don’t get jobs like that in post-Katrina New Orleans. They didn’t get them before the storm, either—especially if they came from the9th Ward.
As in other socially conscious crime films—a description that covers everything from pre-World War IIJames Cagney star vehicles like “The Roaring Twenties” and “Angels with Dirty Faces” to “Dead Presidents,”“Belly,” “Set ItOff,” and “Widows“—this movie makes sure that exploits occur within a context that illuminates (but doesn’t justify) the characters’ choices. “Cut Throat City” is fully aware that it is trying to eat its cake and have it, too, like almost every other crime or gangster film. Itbuilds that contradiction into the characters’ dialogue, a torrent of words that often have a musical or evangelical rhythm.
The talkfocuses on who the characters are and what they want or need. But it alwayscircles back to systemic racism and poverty; multigenerational (and racially diverse) civiccorruption; and a national mindsetthat teaches Americans that if you can only get rich and/or powerful, the law won’t touch you anymore,and the inequities that you grew up with won’t matter.
Inspired by Cousin Bass’ nihilistic sureness and serpent-tongued eloquence, and by bitterness over the government’sneglect ofthe storm-shattered 9th Ward,the foursome hatches a scheme to rob organizations that misusedFederal Emergency Management Association checks. Theirtargets arecasinos and banks. They’re in debt to Cousin Bass and trying to get out. But they onlyget in deeper.
Their crimes rousethe anger of a former corrupt cop turned city councilman, Jackson Symms(Ethan Hawke). Symms pressures police detective Lucina Valencia(Eiza González) to crack the case fast, so that the real estate investors stuffing Symms’ pockets won’t desert a city that’s beginning to “recover” (i.e. inspire outsiders to scarf up now-cheap land). Blink realizescertain details from their first job don’t add up.Cops arrived so fast that it seemed like they were tipped off. Nobody went looking for the gang afterward, even though they started a gunfight and made off with $150,000 (or so the local paper claims).
As Blink and company balance their desire to stay out of prisonwith commitments that keep them in town, the film spends more time with its acesupporting cast.Isaiah Washington is a crooked funeral home director who blows smoke at men who threaten him. Terrence Howard is The Saint, a smirky, insinuating top bosswho carries on likehe’s thepope of sin. Rob Morgan is Courtney, a corrupt cop who used to work with Symms and has one foot in law enforcement and the other in crime. Each gets an arias to show off their skill.Symms’ anguished monologue in a cemetery is a short film in itself, and perhaps a deep-cut cinephilein-joke:Hawke played Hamlet on film 20 years ago.
“Cut Throat City” is hamperedby itsslack storytelling rhythm, which verges on poky even though the movie repeatedly warns us that it isn’t going to be in a rush to get to the next plot point. There are other problems as well. Blink is the only lead character who feels fully thought-out; the rest are defined by one or two traits, such as Andre’s love of the trumpet and discomfort with violence, or Junior’s devotion to his friends and his dog. Gonzalez’s committedperformance as the detectivenever overcomes the pervasive sense that the role was miscast. She’s too young to project the sort of assurance that would make somebody like Courtney or Symms think twice before sassing her. The bits of physical business that seem calculatedto make the character seem more edgy andworld-weary (like her De Niro-style head-tilts and cigarette habit)only underscore the problem.
More care in the writing and casting might’ve put this movie over the top.But the sum is stilla substantial work, worth seeing and talking about, and made with sincerity and imagination.Photographed by Brandon Cox and edited by Joe D'Augustine and Chris Berkenkamp,“Cut Throat City” makes smart use of New Orleans locations, steering clear of tourist landmarks. Cox’s nighttime photographyis vibrantly seedy, favoring hellish reds and cool blues.Costume designerGina Ruiz makes sure that every big-name supporting actor has a look so vivid that youcould sketch it from memory. (Best in showis the Saint’s introductory ensemble: a white dress shirt and pants, brown leather suspenders,Mardi Gras beads, a red bowtie and armbands, and a Panama hat with a sherbet orange band.)The dialogue is packed withquotable bits, from the description of bayou mosquitoes (“so large they could stand flat-footed and fuck a turkey”) to a character’s insistence that “we can see further through our tears than through the lens of a telescope.”
In theanimated opening credits sequence, a face off between white racists and Black gangstasturnsspectacularly gory—like the O-Rin Ishii sequence in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,”but knowingly silly. Turns out the images come fromBlink’s own pen. He keeps getting turned down for paid jobs, ostensibly because his material isn’t “relatable” enough, but really because the industry’s gatekeepers are upper-middle class white men who can’t relate to Blink.After Blink’s rejection, he commiserates with his three closest friends in the back of Junior’s van, smoking weed. Their conversation covers Blink’s work, his influences, and the question of how to make a story both heightened and believable.
“That shit fake, but you can feel the realness in the Mafia motherfuckers,” Blink says of the original “The Godfather.” “It doesn’t have to be this over-the-topTarantino shit.” At first thiscomes across as a jab at Tarantino, who hired RZA to helpsupervise the soundtrack to “Kill Bill,” but it ultimately feelsself-deprecating: some of the violence has a Tarantino feeling, particularly the fate of a man who loses a bet with Cousin Basson a cage fight between raccoons and doesn’t have the money to pay up.It’s an absurd scene, but thedetails leading up to it make you believe in it, like the weight bench in Cousin Bass’sfront yard, and the way his men glower at the foursome on their way in.That’sthe realness Blink was talking about.
One of the most strikingthings about “Cut Throat City” is how the heroes’progress through the underworld becomes lessurgent as the tale unfolds. This, too,is by design. Part of the film’s point is that—to mangle the mostfamous “Casablanca” quote—the armed robberies of four young men don’t amount to a hill of beans in a city (and a country) that thinks freedom means you cannever be held accountable.By the end, the film that “Cut Throat City” mostresembles is “Chinatown,” with a key difference:there’s no deep, dark, secretconspiracy for anybody to expose, beyond logistical or procedural details kept hidden to guarantee the money flow. The rot is right on the surface.
Nobody in this movie loses their innocence. There’s no innocence to lose.
