I ordinarily wouldn’t pay any attention to these nondescript action show made especially for Netflix but this one has decent reviews and strong word-of-mouth recommendations. I’ve long thought that more grounded action movies would work well and ‘lo and behold here one is. This film intelligently uses corrupt police in a podunk rural town as the antagonists because there’s really no scarier villain in modern day America and even weaves in a vaguely plausible plot about civil forfeiture. Unfortunately the production is competent at best and mostly uninspiring. It’s not bad as an action movie but it’s not going to win any awards.

A black man is riding a bicycle into the town of Shelby Springs when he is rammed off the road by a police cruiser and apprehended. They claim that they are acting on reports of a stolen bicycle and find $36,000 in cash on him when they search him. He is Terry Richmond, a Marine Corps veteran and is bringing the cash to bail out his cousin. The police seize the money on suspicion that it is drug related and warn him that they will charge him with a crime if he contests the seizure. At the courthouse, the staff are evasive but one clerk Summer McBride tries her best to help him. He needs his cousin out before he can be transferred to a state prison where he will probably be killed for snitching. When he confronts the police at the station, he learns that the whole department from the chief Sandy Burnne is corrupt, as they rely on the seized money for their funding. When Burnne reneges on a deal to give him back only the $10,000 that he needs for the bail, a physical fight ensues in which Richmond reveals his abilities as a close combat expert.

This film is constructed out of all of the right moving parts. The use of civil forfeiture to fund police departments is real and has been in the news. In modern day America, there are few villains as scary as the police who enjoy untrammeled authority over everyone else. That they dress up their bullying and extortion in legalese and the whole town is effectively in on it makes it all the more terrifying. Try and stand up to them and the police can and will use lethal force against you. As Burnne demonstrates, the brotherhood of cops is absolute and he is able to call on his fellow police in another city to harass Richmond’s employers. Meanwhile we all know that if Richmond in turn actually kills one of them, no matter how justified his actions are, there’s no way that he will ever end up on the right side of the law again. So throughout the film, he fights to subdue and disable through non-lethal means, his hands essentially tied behind his back. It makes for a reasonably plausible story and the action is grounded to a strictly personal level.

In practice however, it doesn’t quite work that well. This scenario is in fact so grounded in reality that the proper way to fight wrongdoing of this nature is through the work of lawyers and journalists, not an ex-Marine martial artist. The only thing Richmond can do is keep himself and Summer out of the hands of the police and desperately search for video evidence of their wrongdoing. At some point, it would just be simpler to portray the police as being personally corrupt. Indeed it doesn’t even make sense why the police would commit such egregious crimes just to provide funding to the town at large rather than for their own personal benefit. There’s mention of how the town’s police force is already on notice and had onerous transparency measures imposed on them. It seems that it would be easier to just report them to whichever body is supposed to be overseeing them. In effect, the film has all of the right parts but then struggles to fit them into the context of an action movie.

Well, director and writer Jeremy Saulnier did try his best and this is a passably entertaining action flick. It doesn’t insult your intelligence and Richmond’s feats are all within the realm of normal human ability which is satisfying in its own way. Still, I now understand that action movies are inherently a rather silly genre. In the modern world, most of our intractable problems aren’t solvable through fisticuffs after all.