SNITCH. (M)(112 min)
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Susan Sarandon, Michael Kenneth Williams.
A callow young man accepts a courier package. Inside is the expected bag of MDMA, and a very unexpected radio transmitter. Mr Plod comes crashing through the shrubbery, and the young man is in the poo up to his eyebrows.
The American “War on Drugs” dictates that even first offenders can’t expect any leniency from the courts, unless they are prepared to inform on other drug-dealers higher up the food chain than them. But our boy has no-one he legitimately can rat out, and he refuses point-blank the oleaginous prosecutor’s suggestion that he just play the game, and give her the names that she suggests.
Just as well then, that his old man is Dwayne Johnson, AKA The Rock.
Johnson’s hard-working truck-company-owning average Joe will do whatever it takes to keep his boy safe from a 10-year stretch, and he agrees to offer himself up as an undercover mule to a particularly toxic bunch of racial stereotypes in exchange for junior’s freedom.
Genre dictates that a film like Snitch will at some point have to degenerate into car chases and shoot-outs, and when it does, these set pieces are very adequately staged. But until that point, this is a surprisingly talky and well-informed yarn. I’ve been telling people for years that Johnson is actually a not-half-bad actor, and I had a warm proud glow, watching him here sharing scenes with Susan Sarandon, Barry Pepper, and Michael Kenneth Williams (That’s Omar, you Wire bores) without ever looking out of his depth.
The trailer and the poster don’t promise much more than a paint-by-numbers revenge flick. But Snitch actually yields up about three-quarters of a pretty smart film, with a couple of thunderous truck crashes tacked on the end. Something for everyone, then.
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