Unintentional Comedy

Rating: 4/10 (13 February 2018)

*** mild spoilers ***
1960's Detroit is in a state of utter chaos. Police and military swarm the streets in an attempt to control rioting, violence and looting that has ravaged the city for days. Some people are partying in a motel not doing any harm and one guy decides it would be funny to shoot several rounds (just sound generating blanks) of his starter pistol out the window in the direction of the squad of soldiers/police across the street. The police storm the building trying to find the "shooter" and in the process shoot and kill the guy that had shot off the starter blank rounds.
I laughed uncontrollably at how idiotic this moron with the starter pistol was and how hilarious it was that the writer decided that he be the one killed as the police raided the building. It could have been anyone else that decided to do a rabbit run and subsequently got killed by the trigger happy police.
What follows is equally comedic when you watch the remaining party goers submit to assault, torture and torment by the police as they attempt to discover who it was that was shooting at the police. No one will admit that yes, one among them was shooting but it was only a blank shooting starter pistol and that in fact the guy that did the shooting was already dead on the floor.
If they had simply explained this then the entire interrogation/torture event would have been over. You could have wrapped up the film and rolled the credits. To me this was hilarious. Why would they not simply explain this, tell the cops where they thought the pistol was and be done with it.
The writer chose to have the characters all remain silent in spite of the threats and beatings. It makes no sense and this is the basis for comedy.
In addition to this obvious error in screen writing the cinematography is just terrible. The camera jumps around incessantly regardless of whether the characters are motionless sitting in chairs or whether they are running frantically down the street. Zooming is excessive and random. The shot will suddenly show part of someone's foot, then the side of a head, then down at the floor, then an overly zoomed shot of a wiener cooking in a fry pan... etc etc. Was the camera man ON DRUGS ??? Why didn't the director control him ?? The entire affair makes you sea sick. Its a cheap, unprofessional, grade C effort. The budget of $34 million posted on IMDB makes no sense. This film has the look of a 2 million dollar effort.
Overall I must admit that I did get some laughs at how absurd the story was, how pathetic the characters behaved and every time the camera man suddenly zoomed way in on some random object or part of someone's body it made me smile. So I'll give it a 4/10 which meant there was some entertainment value but overall it bothered me more than not.
Yes, yes I know there is supposed to be a message about some social/political issues here but that message is utterly lost in the crappy delivery style of the film.