16 BLOCKS

WB

RELEASED 28 April 2006

The premise of ‘16 Blocks’ is simple enough: hungover NYPD detective Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis) is assigned to drive petty criminal Eddie Bunker (Mos Def) to the grand jury courtroom for 10am, 16 blocks away. It’s 8.02am, and it should only take 15 minutes. But some bent cops don’t want Eddie to make it, so Jack is soon up against the entire NYPD, not to mention the clock.

‘16 Blocks’ needed to be a sequence of daring chase/escape set-pieces full of creativity and filmed with imagination, but director Richard Donner somehow drags this movie out to be a ‘crawl against the clock.’ Shoot-outs are captured in close-up so it’s difficult to see clearly exactly what’s going on, and they lack any kind of excitement. On the streets the buildings and heavy traffic don’t inform us as to how close our hero is to reaching the courtroom, one street looking just like the last. The whole film feels messy and in need of a much sharper style. To make matters worse, the script is forgettable, and the conclusion of the film suffers from eyebrow-raising plot inconsistencies.

Bruce Willis does the best job he can, with the decision to make him look older aiding him in characterising his less-than-indestructible cop. Mos Def will divide opinion (he talks in a silly helium-sounding pitch), but this is not a great performance regardless.

There’s clearly a lot of talent involved in ‘16 Blocks’, but the approach to tackling the film is all wrong, with the script needing some blockbuster ‘ooomph.’

TWO OUT OF FIVE