Sacrifice (2019)
(On TV, October 2021) Star power, sex-appeal, likability… call it what you want, but such a thing can matter a lot in compensating for an otherwise disappointing film. I would watch Paula Patton in just about anything, and so she’s one of the few things keeping me from calling BET+ Original film Sacrifice a complete miss. Here she plays a high-powered entertainment lawyer who, rather than do dull stuff like negotiating contracts and taking care of intellectual rights tangles, uses shady methods to investigate crimes and fight the local District Attorney on behalf of her rather loathsome clients. There’s a uniquely BET sensibility to the premise, blending flashy entertainment bling (all of her clients are music people—nothing so mundane as a writer or non-hyphenate actor) and the narrative assets of someone who can fight crime. Or condone it, as the film’s fuzzy morality suggests. If that sounds like an ideal premise for a Ray Donovan-like TV series, then you’ll understand my growing dismay as the film heads for a non-conclusive ending as if it was a TV pilot, because it is, and to a degree rarely seen in publicly aired pilots. Interesting characters are introduced, plot lines are set in motion, the dramatic redemption arc is barely sketched (let alone begun), an innocent killed, an overarching mystery set up… and then the film ends at a funeral, with opposite personalities hissing at each other while outlining the moral stakes of the series. Designed to hook viewers into a series that, as of one year after the announcement, was theoretically approved but never put in production due to the pandemic, Sacrifice is probably avoided until the follow-up series materializes [November 2021: Which it did!], or unless your crush on Patton is strong enough. Uninspired direction and some clunky dialogue don’t help. The unfinished narrative business also gives a very odd morality to the standalone result: The protagonist is set up as having many long-term issues (murdered dad, promiscuousness, shady morals) that are designed to be untangled and resolved over a long period of time, but just make her feel like an unlikable villain—even when she sororially tangles with a bullheaded DA that, from an objective perspective, should be the person we should cheer for. Liking Patton (and the extravagant outfits she gets in every scene) helps a lot, but she’s a beautiful actress who needs to be firmly directed to break out of her emotionless delivery, and I don’t think that writer-director Chris Stokes was able to do that: whether it’s a quirk of character or the actress herself, her flat blank-face line reading is not nearly effective enough. I did like many of the supporting characters, though—Erica Ash frequently rolls over Patton as the hard-charging DA, Veronika Boseman is captivating in a supporting role and there’s a good geekish character that feels like an ensemble dark horse. You can see where a series would go with those elements, but that presupposes that a series would be there to provide character development and dramatic resolution. Right now, though—none of that is available. Some pilots are developed without resolution… but they’re never shown publicly without the rest of the series, and that’s probably what should have happened with Sacrifice.
