Just bleak, hard hitting stuff. Strike is made a scapegoat by everyone just as he tries to turn around. They don’t care about him, the point isn’t to help him or anyone. It’s to wrap up cases, it’s to soothe a police officer’s pride, it’s to fuel a war that was never meant to be won. Kietel is excellent as an officer seemingly playing to the old honorable archetype but in truth is a man who wants to prove his intellect to himself, who takes the job as a personal slight, who realizes this about himself but never takes the step to actually confront it. Keith David is so made for a Spike Lee film I’m amazed this is his only one. Lee’s directorial style, brimming with emotion, colliding with a gritty hood drama results in something mesmerizing. A little slow and drifting in the middle, it’s still an enthralling watch.

The pinnacle is Kietel walking Tyrone through his statement, Lee’s classic monologue stylings just hammering home how insidious and almost reality warping this method is. What the coo says goes, and in this case it’s only lucky happenstance this kid knows another cop. Its weaponized for him instead of just being weaponized against a dead black man, but the film paints it as anything but triumphant or heroic. Nothing in this film is.