Canal Street (2018)
(On TV, November 2022) By the standards of BET-broadcast thrillers, Canal Street is both completely on-brand and a bit weird—and by that, I mean “weirder than the usual kind of BET weirdness.” It’s a clunky crime thriller with a socially conscious intent and a religious angle, a tapestry of family drama and political ambition, an attempt at looking at the social ramifications of a thriller plot, and a manipulative melodrama all at once. It’s markedly less fun to watch than the usual BET house brand (which is often so deliberately ludicrous as to court comedy even in the harshest of thrillers) but it just may be slightly more respectable than usual. The plot revolves around a few minutes we don’t see until the very end of the film: what happened between a black teenager riding along with a former white rival, and the moment in which the black teen was seen holding his white classmate’s lifeless body. As a racially charged murder trial roils Chicago media, the film focuses on the black teen’s father, a lawyer who takes on his son’s defence and investigators untangling the thick web of complications leading to the night’s tragedies. From the get-go, a chorus of talk-radio voices (real-life personalities playing themselves, I gather) attempt to contextualize the melodrama in wider social terms, while interludes show the impact of the character’s religious beliefs on their actions. The problem is that the film’s two sides don’t mesh cleanly—in fact, the loftier ambitions of the film in decrying racial discrimination by police are undermined by a basic story that’s too ludicrous for words—you don’t need to be a police or judicial expert to spot one inconsistency after another, contrivances and dramatic shortcuts that don’t create the aura of credibility that Canal Street needs to succeed. (Seeing the incomparable Lance Reddick in a small role helps a bit, but not enough.) What’s more, the socially conscious ambitions of Canal Street rob it of the trashy entertainment value that the film’s main plot suggests it should have: by the final twist, we’re left with a dismal and sad tale. Even the religious content, which could have been a source of inspiration, points too clearly to the screenwriter’s divine hand rather than create more much-needed verisimilitude. Rewatch value is low—writer/director Rhyan LaMarr has his intentions in the right place, but he needs to figure out what story he’s telling and stick to it.
