Creating a good film about addiction is hard. Addicts manipulate, exploit and isolate themselves from everyone and everything not committed to helping them score their next fix. Their decisions are irrational and infuriating, often everyone (themselves included) can see the car crash coming, but the addict is incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. This makes for complicated characters, but doesn’t do a lot to drive the plot of a feature film forward.
With this in mind , I get why Joey Klein created a plot centered around stolen drugs and the fractures it creates amongst the characters. It established some sort of narrative hook to focus on and I get that, but that doesn’t make me hate this choice any less. As a result of this story, the characters are left feeling hollow and often like caricatures (“Polo” and “Jimmy” in particular) rather than fully formed examples of individuals embroiled in one of the biggest crises of the 21st century. Overall the film is a somber snapshot of an epidemic that governments and law enforcement have done little to curb, but is too sensationalist and a bit too cheesy to really land. I applaud Klein for choosing to make films about such important, difficult subject matter, but in this case the plot device and dialogue were messy, serving to lessen the impact of the film’s message.
Creating a good film about addiction is hard. Addicts manipulate, exploit and isolate themselves from everyone and everything not committed to helping them score their next fix. Their decisions are irrational and infuriating, often everyone (themselves included) can see the car crash coming, but the addict is incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. This makes for complicated characters, but doesn’t do a lot to drive the plot of a feature film forward.
With this in mind , I get why Joey Klein created a plot centered around stolen drugs and the fractures it creates amongst the characters. It established some sort of narrative hook to focus on and I get that, but that doesn’t make me hate this choice any less. As a result of this story, the characters are left feeling hollow and often like caricatures (“Polo” and “Jimmy” in particular) rather than fully formed examples of individuals embroiled in one of the biggest crises of the 21st century. Overall the film is a somber snapshot of an epidemic that governments and law enforcement have done little to curb, but is too sensationalist and a bit too cheesy to really land. I applaud Klein for choosing to make films about such important, difficult subject matter, but in this case the plot device and dialogue were messy, serving to lessen the impact of the film’s message.
