Review: Supremacy


Joe Anderson plays a white supremacist thug released from prison after a 15 year stint, and looking for more trouble on his first day of freedom. Along with ‘white supremacist groupie’ Dawn Olivieri, he gets pulled over by an African-American cop, and being a racist dickhead with a short fuse, he shoots the officer dead. Now clearly in deep faecal matter, they break into someone’s home, thinking it’s currently unoccupied. They’re wrong, as an African-American family headed by Danny Glover is awakened to find two armed intruders in their house spewing racial epithets at them. Glover, an ex-con himself tries to reason with Anderson that killing them isn’t the answer. Lela Rochon plays the family matriarch, Derek Luke and Nick Chinlund are cops, Julie Benz is Luke’s wife, and Anson Mount plays Anderson’s decidedly non-Aryan looking mentor, currently incarcerated himself.

 

From what I can gather, director Deon Taylor (the uninspired slasher flick “7eventy 5ive”) wanted to move out of the horror genre and deliver something a little weightier and meatier. Better luck next time, Deon because this 2014 racially-charged crime/drama strains credibility for something supposedly ‘Inspired by True Events’. It’s all well and good for something to be inspired by truth, but if you don’t actually believe it, the filmmaker has failed in their job. Taylor and screenwriter Eric J. Adams (who tellingly comes from mostly short films) failed to convince me that the walking, talking white supremacist trash clichés Joe Anderson and Dawn Olivieri play are anything remotely plausible. If any of this is true, these are two seriously dumb-arse people in addition to being thoroughly repellent. Danny Glover, meanwhile plays an impossibly naïve man, and while his performance is good, the character is entirely ridiculous. I couldn’t buy his actions in the slightest. True or not, it’s a bit predictable that Derek Luke’s sheriff character would have a personal stake in the events.

 

The other big issue I had with the film is that the characters on both sides of the racial divide here are unpleasant and mostly unsympathetic (The subject matter being unpleasant is unavoidable, but did the family have to be so argumentative towards each other, let alone their captors?). Having the two obvious villains of the piece be the two main characters was definitely a mistake. As I said, Glover is good, and there’s two more fairly solid performances in smaller roles from Derek Luke (why the hell hasn’t he happened?) and Nick Chinlund. Lela Rochon is made to look as unflattering as possible, and is saddled with a character I didn’t like anywhere near as much as I was probably supposed to. Her character is, however, the only person in the damn movie on the victim side of things who has both brains and balls (so to speak).

 

I like a good true crime movie. This isn’t a good true crime movie. The characters neither convinced me nor pulled me into the story, and being based on true events isn’t enough of an excuse given the story itself is as old as the hills, real or not. Thoroughly ordinary.

 

Rating: C

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