Recensioni de* critic*

As a steadfast fan of Near Dark and Blue Steel, I have tenaciously resisted the mainstream shift in Bigelow's career represented by The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. . . . But what I took to be the political evasions of those films . . . become, by displacement, the central subject of the powerful Detroit, which is really about the State's terror regime in a condition of urban, race war. Not a ‘return to form', but a new and exciting form for Bigelow to have attained here.

One fascinating thing about the film is its patchwork texture... Another is its unorthodox structure, starting with a big picture network narrative, drawing the characters together for a taut, contained hostage situation with protagonists held at gunpoint by cops in the Algiers Motel, then breaking free and trundling along through a protracted, disjointed aftermath that leaves the viewer with no idea where the thing is going or when it will stop.

I found the ending of Detroit a little unsatisfying, at least on the basis of a single viewing... The trial is not brought to life, as the earlier scenes are, but sketched, and Bigelow loses the focus on character that is the strength of the body of the film, without expanding its scope to take in the incident's political repercussions. But in a sense this disappointment is testament to how rich the characterisations are, and how powerful her film is.

For all its technical craft, occasional grace notes... and its smorgasbord of alert performances from a game young cast, Detroit is difficult to recommend to anyone already feeling emotionally pulverized by the ongoing spectacle of anti-black American racism. As noisy and disorderly as the unrest it presents, Bigelow and Boal's latest is perilously close to resembling a bull let loose in a china shop where the china has already been smashed.

Art can and does change the way people see the world. But the combination of tastefulness and relentlessness with which Detroit approaches its subject matter is careful and dutiful and rarely resonant, despite Boyega's heartbreakingly world-weary gravity, despite Anthony Mackie's exhausted anger as a just-returned Vietnam vet being treated like an enemy combatant in his own country, despite Poulter's chilling smirk, and despite the terrifying visuals of tanks rolling down a city street.

To call Bigelow's film a massive disappointment isn't to include it among the truly bad movies that have been dragging their way through the cinemas this summer (it's a letdown only because I still expect things of Bigelow)... Though buoyed by her film sense, Detroit succumbs to problems endemic to "Based on Real Events" prestige properties, films that too often are preoccupied with the truth while not feeling entirely honest—the latter being what we should demand of art.

Bigelow's intentions come through clearly: to depict an incident—and a climate—of racism, to show that the cruelty of these deeds was multiplied by their ultimate impunity, and to suggest that, in the intervening half-century since the events depicted in the film took place, little has changed. Movies aren't made with intentions, though; they're made with people and with equipment, and what Bigelow has her actors do for the benefit of the camera is repellent to imagine.

The movie runs nearly two and a half hours, and the viewer feels every minute, in both the good and bad senses of that phrase. It's an exercise in clammy cinematic claustrophobia, a vision of law enforcement as organized sadism that is itself a sadistic experience to endure.

It's transparently an activist film. As a result it's dictated more by the views and emotions of the filmmakers than by artistic judgment or taste. Some viewers might think that's the appropriate treatment for such a serious and important subject, but I'd argue that such an approach makes the movie less memorable. Bigelow and Boal ambitiously try to cover a lot of ground, but they've done so unevenly, and watching Detroit is ultimately an unnecessarily frustrating experience.

Bigelow's genre shift is itself the film's most powerful political statement. The newsreel style of the early sequence keeps audiences engaged by scope, and skeptics at arm's length in the knowledge that demonstrations in America circa 2017 "aren't like that anymore, at least." The debasement and cold-blooded murder that dominates the film after the shift doesn't let a single viewer off the hook.

Angry, lucid, bludgeoning, subtle, and at times surprisingly moving... In the end, by homing in on the specifics of a horrific "incident," Bigelow has crystallized the metropolitan chaos of Detroit and made it stand for any city blighted by inequality and racism. In the course of the movie, the city of Detroit comes to signify a warped state of mind and to embody, metaphorically, an ingrown, obdurate, layered kind of racism.

It eventually becomes clear that we spent the majority of the movie looking at terror and injustice without much of a chance to understand how those involved were able to withstand it. They for the most part don't have genuine inner lives, just outer wounds, neat character arcs, and obvious moments of semiresistance.