“Snitch” may not be the movie you’ve been lead to believe.
Trailers and TV spots make it out to be an adrenaline-charged man movie for
men, full of explosions, gun fights, car chases, and, you know, Dwayne “The
Rock” Johnson taking down a vicious drug cartel to save his son. That’s one
hell of a dad right there. While all of this does come into play, the
high-octane stuff is relatively minimal. Hell, the only time the Rock gets into
a physical altercation he gets his ass handed to him by a couple of punk kids.
The whole movie is Johnson playing against type. He’s not a
badass, he’s not a hero, he’s just a concerned parent, and this easily ranks
among the former professional wrestler’s best performances to date. Director
Ric Roman Waugh eschews the action trappings, leaning more towards tense
thriller and family melodrama territory, which is where “Snitch” is the
strongest and weakest, respectively.
John Matthews—the most generic, mundane name you can
imagine—has a somewhat estranged 18-year-old son, Jason (Rafi Gavron), who
foolishly accepts a box of ecstasy a friend mails to him. When he is
immediately busted by the DEA, it turns out the quantity of pills qualifies him
for a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 10 years, unless he rats on some of
his own buddies. In a movie named “Snitch,” Jason is the one who actually
refuses to snitch, instead taking the years, despite the fact that he receives
regular beatings for his trouble. Daddy, however, has none of his kid’s qualms
against snitching, and sets out to knock some time off of Junior’s sentence by
rolling over on anyone he can entrap.
“Snitch” is a jab at the injustice of mandatory minimum
sentencing laws, one that doesn’t particularly connect. Not for lack of trying,
mind you, they hammer at this point throughout. The situation is as bland and
palatable as humanly possible, designed to make the audience think: if this can
happen to a nice suburban white kid (even though Johnson is black and Samoan, Jason
is a whitewashed Hollywood every-kid, and there’s no attempt to make them look
related in the slightest) from a good home who just made one teensy, tiny
mistake that he only kinda, sorta made (he told his buddy
not to send him the ecstasy, but he did it anyway), then it
can happen to anyone.
The bad guys are all mono-dimensional racial movie
types—Michael Kenneth Williams basically revamps his Omar person from “The
Wire,” only without the charisma, and Benjamin Bratt is a suave, savage head of
a violent Mexican cartel. John doesn’t care who he has to bulldoze in order to
free his son. This includes Daniel (Jon Bernthal), an ex-con and two-striker
who works for him. Daniel has a wife and young son of his own, and is making an
earnest effort to go straight after a lifetime of being a hardened gangbanger,
but in true Hollywood fashion, he’s struggling.
When John offers him a ridiculous amount of money for an
introduction into the drug trafficking world, Daniel has few options, even
though this constitutes conspiracy, would be a third strike, and potentially
mean spending the rest of his life in prison. Playing the morally torn guy in a
tough spot, Bernthal is strong, as well as being way less
annoying than his interpretation of Shane on “The Walking Dead.”
You want to root for John. He, too, is a good guy in a hard
place, trying to do right by his family. And there’s just something inherently
likable about The Rock when he gets in front of a camera. Still, the thing with
Daniel is a total dick move, as John never takes the likely consequences for
this other man and his family into account. From the first
step, John intends to turn on everyone he encounters, and he knows what that
will most likely mean for Daniel, but he goes right ahead and does it anyway.
Like I said, dick move.
The story unfolds exactly as you expect it to. Everything
that always goes wrong in a movie goes wrong in this movie.
Everyone you expect to pull some bullshit, like a politically ambitious state’s
attorney (Susan Sarandon), pull precisely that shit you see coming a mile away.
Dialogue is used primarily for exposition, not characterization, and every
detail you need to know becomes a convenient part of casual conversation. That
is, after all, how you learn that Daniel used to be a “shot caller from the
East Side.” Combined with a collection of generic gang tattoos, this is all you
really learn about his past, except that he’s trying to outrun it. There is no
subtext here, nothing subtle going on at all, and “Snitch” is obvious at every
turn.
If you can get past the awkward political misstep, the
blatantness of every encounter, and scrape through the heavy-handed family
melodrama, what you’re left with is a decently tense thriller. Push all the
peripheral junk to the side, take the scenes for themselves, and “Snitch” isn’t
all that bad. When John finally gets his sit down with Malik (Williams), or
when he goes on his first run for the cartel, these moments, and more, work
precisely as they’re supposed to. They’re taut, pressure driven scenes where
the heightened sensibility pushes the pace and action. That carries the bulk of
the film.
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