Bigelow and Boal's Torture Porn 2: This Time It's Bad

Rating: 4/10 (9 June 2020)

"Detroit" is disgusting--and not only for the racist Milgram experiment based on the real incident at the Algiers Motel--but for how director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal exploit the events for their morally-dubious depictions of torture continued from their last collaboration, "Zero Dark Thirty" (2012), which depicted so-called "enhanced interrogation" in the lead up to killing Osama bin Laden. Well, whereas Bigelow and Boal controversially thought it fair to suggest that torture was useful for that purpose; in "Detroit," they seem to entirely reverse coarse. The only consistency is the cinematic exploitation of racial others being traumatized by sadists with guns--or, rather, cameras. Such exploitation is much easier to overlook when those being interrogated are terrorists and when gruesome scenes are kept brief, or when the revulsion remains the domain of fictional horror flick scenarios, but "Detroit" is based on a real tragedy, involving racist cops murdering innocent Black men and sexually and otherwise physically assaulting two women, and it goes on for a long time--seemingly longer than the already-lengthy runtime would indicate.
It would be one thing if this sequence were brutal only to authentically depict a historical tragedy, or to relate it to the more recent context of police killings, the unrest in Ferguson a few years prior to this movie, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement and preceding the current protests and violence of 2020, but "Detroit" doesn't serve that function. The picture's prologue, going so far back as titles explaining the Great Migration and segregation, to the 1967 Detroit Riot, and the picture's third act, which mostly focuses on a farce of a courtroom drama at the expense of following through on tracing the survivors living with the trauma they endured (only the singer receives any justice in the latter regard), are completely blundered. We see one of the cops murder a looter early on, which is never followed up on, either. It's just another scene for the filmmakers to perversely demonstrate a simulated lack of respect for Black lives on par with its villains. Sure, it's hackneyed screenwriting foreshadowing that a character is a sociopath, but it also foreshadows the sickness of Bigelow and Boal's torture porn to come and the by-large removal of the same agency of its Black characters as done by the picture's villains towards its victims.
As pointed out by film critic Mike D'Angelo, one of the most glaring indications of this picture's problems here is in the editing of the death of Aubrey Pollard. Unlike the pretend executions that the police enact in their perverse game, the picture cuts away from the room where this one takes place, as we hear the shotgun blasts, only to learn shortly thereafter that the cop really murdered Pollard--seemingly unaware that his fellow officers were only playing a twisted game aimed at manufacturing confessions. That is not how you film a docudrama. It's a shameful folly of suspense filmmaking. It's intended to be exciting and thrilling, and that's shameful.
One silver lining of "Detroit" is that it's masterfully photographed and even the editing and cutting back and forth between characters is effective for its intended purposes, misplaced and hostile as they may be. The shaky, darting camerawork especially works well at affecting a spectatorial participation in the hectic events. If only such stylistic competence were in the hands of filmmakers who also had the compassion and understanding of how to depict such a tragedy.