Review: 16 Blocks

Of all the pleasures that movies can offer us, none may be as simple or as pure as watching characters we like run for their lives. 16 Blocks, the latest film from longtime action-hack director Richard Donner, has that kind of elemental grace to it – even if it doesn't have much else. Burnt-out, alcoholic, pot-bellied, limping and wheezing, New York Police Department Detective Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis) is finishing up a night shift that was uneventful at best and, at worst, just another 8-hour span of time in his ongoing slow-motion suicide. Desperate to get out of the building, get a drink and get some sleep at the end of his shift, Jack instead is handed the last-minute short-straw gig of escorting a witness over to the courthouse.

The witness is Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), a nervy chatterbox who's spent half his life in jail – you'd call him a career criminal, but the fact is he hasn't made much of a career out of it. Eddie speaks nonstop in a wheedling, agitated, nasal singsong that makes you kinda want to kill him; the fact that Eddie's testimony this morning will put a ring of crooked high-ranking cops in jail for a long time makes them definitely want to kill him. The grand jury stands down at 10:00 am, less than two hours from now. The courthouse is – you guessed it – 16 blocks away. And Jack Mosely's simple task is going to get a lot more complicated, especially when his partner of 20 years, Frank Nugent (David Morse), is revealed as the top man of the corrupt cops.

16 Blocks is one of those action films where it doesn't take a lot of brain power to sum up the premise, the plot or the characters. If anything could make the movie stand out, it would be in the execution of those elements. And in that regard,16 Blocks is a bit of a curiosity: it offers some surprises that elevate it up from rote, tired hackwork, but it also sticks firmly within the comforts of formula. The action sequences are shot with something like verve and excitement, but they're few and far between. There are dramatic moments about corruption, politics and personality, but they never get much deeper than the skins of the characters. In other words, 16 Blocks feels like an uneasy hybrid of Lethal Weapon and Sidney Lumet, where the action and suspense don't come fast or hard enough to really impress, and where the character moments and attempts at acting are constantly being interrupted by the next foot chase or shootout.

Willis has played this part before – often – in films from Hostage to Mercury Rising and even in the Die Hard franchise. There was a great line about Hollywood swim-screen queen Esther Williams: "Dry, she ain't much; wet, she's a star!"  You could make a similar observation about Willis: well and healthy, there's no point in watching him; beat him up a little, and you can't take your eyes off him. It's also worth noticing that when we first see Willis in 16 Blocks, it's as he ascends a staircase – so we get to see a multi-million dollar movie star enter his latest starring vehicle leading with his thinning hairline. Willis's cop is not, to paraphrase Donner's own Lethal Weapon getting too old for this stuff; he is too old for this stuff.

As for Mos Def's Eddie Bunker, he's a nervy, nerdy, anxious presence; a few years ago, you would have cast Steve Buscemi in the part. Eddie believes in the possibility of redemption, probably because he has to; Jack's not convinced: "Days change. Seasons change. Not people." There's a kind of cynicism about 16 Blocks – nearly everyone in the film is motivated by expediency more than morality – and you have to wonder if there might have been a little bit more of that in Richard Wenk's script before Donner came on board. While Willis and Def are the stars here, the best lines go to Morse's Nugent; Morse has the charismatic, beefy charm of the archetypal corrupt cop: you know just by looking at Nugent that it's been a long time since he paid full price for a meal or a suit, but he still looks sharply-dressed and well-fed. Nugent is a criminal, a shakedown man and a killer, but he's not all bad, breaking the law and the rules in order to clear cases and put bad guys away; if Nugent were the focus of the film, that might have been a lot more interesting. (It would also be called The Shield, and star Michael Chiklis, but that's another story.)

As a director, Donner manages to work up a few surprises and fresh moments; it's more than you'd expect from the man who recently gave us Timeline, but the film seems to spend a lot of time clearing its throat as opposed to actually getting to the action. 16 Blocks also falls into that curious valley between the extremes of action films: too high-strung and overblown and we feel like we're watching a cartoon; too flat and real and we don't feel like we're watching an action movie. So, 16 Blocks doesn't have the giddy goofball punch of a Lethal Weapon … and it doesn't have the acting power or drama of a film like Serpico or Prince of the City. Some rainy Sunday afternoon in the future, I'll be channel-surfing while I have a sandwich and I'll be kinda-sorta glad to stumble across 16 Blocks on cable, if only for Morse and Mos Def, but I'll be more distracted by it than attracted to it, more dragged along than carried away.