I promise I’ll get around to reviewing about the period drama-slash-heist thriller 1992 in a moment, but first let’s talk about competition cooking shows. I’m a big fan of them, and I’m sure a decent few people reading this review will be familiar with the concept I’m going to get into in a second. On some of these shows, chefs are given a secret ingredient and told to make it the star of whatever dish they come up with. Sometimes, these chefs will get really ambitious and decide to create not one, but two separate dishes and say that the ingredient has been interpreted in two different ways. It’s a risky approach, not just because there’s potential to screw up two dishes instead of one, but because the final results can only be judged as a singular whole rather than two separate entities.
1992 is an example of a singular idea for a film split off two ways where only one of them really works, thusly bringing down the grade of the whole. Set against the aftermath of the April 29, 1992 verdict in the trial of LAPD officers captured on camera beating Rodney King, this latest film from director and co-writer Ariel Vroman (The Iceman, Criminal) has a really well done, emotionally impactful, and wonderfully acted thread and another that just kinda sucks the air and life out of everything around it no matter how much effort is expended. Yes, eventually these threads meet up and inform each other, but even at the point of overlapping one of the stories remains vastly better than the other.
Mercer Bey (Tyrese Gibson) is a reformed gang member – once known around his Crenshaw neighbourhood as the feared and revered OG Merc – who has been out of prison for six months, living a clean life and recently granted provisional custody of his teenage son, Antione (Christopher A’mmanuel). Before he heads out to his job at a metalworking facility that processes platinum for use in catalytic converters, Mercer tells his son to be careful and come straight home after school, fearing that things could start popping off in the hood in a bad way if the cops on trial are acquitted of their crimes. Mercer’s fears prove to be founded, and he asks the plant’s kindly security guard (Michael Beasley) if he can bring his kid there after hours, believing it’s a safer place to be than at ground zero for a near certain riot.
This story is very good. Even though Vroman doesn’t have the budget at his disposal to recreate the scale and totality of the Los Angeles uprising, 1992 manages some astute period detail and fine touches that give this otherwise lower budgeted effort a lived in quality and sense of authenticity. It’s a simple and moving story of a father and son trying to fight past traumas all while generational and racial injustices have found their way to the family’s doorstep. A’mmanuel makes a nice impression as an everyday teen under extraordinary pressures, while Gibson gets one of the best roles of his acting career. Gibson (who also has an album coming out the same day 1992 releases) taps into a wearier, more hardened and introspective energy reminiscent of his outstanding work in John Singleton’s perpetually underrated 2001 effort, Baby Boy.
But the tribulations of Mercer and Antione are only half the story being told in 1992. The other half is a clunky, poorly written, inorganic heist movie that also happens to be about fathers and sons. In this part of the movie, Riggins (Scott Eastwood) is attempting to put together a team – including his younger brother (Dylan Arnold) and best friend (Clé Bennett) – that can rob the precious metals vault inside the plant where Mercer works, netting them approximately ten million in unrefined platinum bullion. Riggins’ more experienced and hardened criminal father, Lowell (Ray Liotta, in the last role he filmed before his passing), doesn’t think the job is a good idea, saying he thinks it will take a miracle to pull it off. Riggins, who sees this job as his last big score before getting out of the game, finds that miracle in the form of the riots, which will create a cover that can pull heat away from the metal plant and make their job infinitely easier. Or so they think.
The heist movie thread flounders for a number of reasons. The characters are all stock tough guys, some of whom will turn out to be more sympathetic than others, and it’s not hard to guess which ones. The dialogue is tin-eared, expositional and reductive in the extreme, forcing the characters to explain mundane details that Vroman can’t find a way to show in the fabric of the film. The viewer already understands that these two separate stories are going to collide, so they won’t be surprised by all of the things that go wrong during the heist or where all of Vroman and co-writer Sascha Penn’s unsubtle foreshadowing is going to lead. And to top all of that off, Eastwood, who carries these sections of the film, isn’t up to the task at hand, turning in a wooden, hollow performance. Liotta is a good enough performer to make something out of what very little he has been given here. Eastwood, however, has all of his limitations as a performer exposed and is hung out to dry.
It takes about an hour of bouncing back and forth between good material and subpar action movie fodder that’s been done better many times before for all of the threads in 1992 to link up. Thankfully for viewers when they do, things get back on track a bit because Gibson, A’mmanuel, and Liotta have crafted interesting characters worth following once the tone shifts into full on action movie, cat-and-mouse mode. 1992 pretty much forgets about the historical events of its title and simply uses them as a plot point that helps explain why the cops don’t show up to the numerous alarms and red flags being raised. But at least the action on display is moderately creative and competently staged, meaning it’s not entirely on the shoulders of the film’s best performers to save the project as a whole.
1992 isn’t an anthology film or something told in two separate acts, so it has to be graded in totality. If they were separate, the bits involving Tyrese protecting his on-screen son is the sort of thing I would wholeheartedly endorse with some degree of enthusiasm. Everything involving Eastwood and Liotta is something that – if we go back to the food analogy – should’ve been left off the dish because it adds nothing but an unnecessary amount of grease. But the more I think about the whole, the more I realize that the good bits are of greater value than the lesser ones, and at least the bits that don’t work retain a bit of panache and craft. 1992 squeaks by with a pass, but this is a story that could’ve used some judicious editing.
1992 opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, August 30, 2024.
