It’s only when it tries to be about something weightier and more substantial that “Black and Blue” loses its way and feels like it’ll never end. The topic of racism and the police sadly couldn’t be more relevant. People of color are needlessly profiled and targeted in cities across the United States, all too often resulting in violence and death. The use of the sort of body camera that’s crucial to the propulsion of Peter A. Dowling’s script is an attempt to stop this troubling trend. For the most part, all those ideas are baked into the story; it’s when the characters stop to explain their motivations and actions, leading to a series of false endings, that “Black and Blue” slogs into overlong territory.
With shades of “Training Day,” “Black and Blue” finds Harris’ idealistic Alicia West learning more than she ever could have imagined just three weeks after joining the force. A U.S. Army veteran who did tours in Afghanistan, Alicia has returned to her hometown and found that her old neighborhood is more dangerous than it was when she left. Taylor depicts one particular housing project as a horrifying concrete crucible, a place that breaks down its residents to their most base instincts in the name of survival.
Having offered to work a double shift to allow her partner (Reid Scott) to enjoy a long-planned date night with his wife, Alicia finds herself exposed to another group of officers and narcotics detectives, ones who make her feel even more insecure about her newbie status. Harris vividly finds the shading in her character’s search for an identity, for a place that feels right. Her mother has just died and she has no other family. She’s a New Orleans native but she’s been away for a while, which causes the locals to treat her like an interloper. She’s black but she’s also a cop—or blue, hence the title—so while her old friends and neighbors no longer trust her, neither do her new co-workers. You can sense her isolation, the way she flinches a little when she tries to be nice to a 10-year-old boy outside a run-down convenience store and is rebuffed in response. And in the film’s tense opening sequence, a couple of patrol cops pull her over for no apparent reason while she’s going for a morning jog in a hoodie, only to continue treating her rudely once they discover she’s blue, too.
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