Shooting Heroin doesn’t have anything new to say about the opioid epidemic, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands in the United States and began with the phenomenon of doctors over-prescribing medication to beef up their industry. Indeed, the movie doesn’t seem to have a thought in its head about the epidemic at its center. It seems, instead, that writer/director Spencer T. Folmar is far more interested in a position of posturing condescension. First, the protagonist becomes willing to exact violent revenge upon those who might, even indirectly, profit in some way from the epidemic. Second, composer Mike Newport’s score would be a better fit in some action or espionage franchise than a modest crime thriller that wants to be a character study.
In other words, Folmar believes his audience should be in the grip of tension, rather than accompanying its characters in the throes of grief. Everyone in the small-town setting has been touched by the epidemic in some way. There are the dealers, of course, one of whom is killed in the prologue and another of whom we see but never hear. There are customers, such as they are, whose deaths are a direct result of both the transaction and, although the movie never acknowledges this, their own addiction. There are the law enforcement officials, who are either powerless to do anything substantive or are allowing it to happen for the simplification of their own bureaucracy. And there are the loved ones, such as the trio of vigilantes led by our loosely defined “hero.”
Following that prologue, in which the murder of a drug dealer becomes headline news, a debate arises about whether such an act—as in, the intentional ending of a human life by the hand of another—is permissible within this culture of over-prescribing and immediately subsequent deaths in droves. Some are sympathetic toward the murderer, such as Adam (Alan Powell, one-note and unconvincing as the lead), a war veteran who loses his younger sister (Daniella Mason) to the epidemic. Others are not, such as Hazel (Sherilyn Fenn), who lost two sons within 12 hours of each other and has some words of caution that have gone unheeded. Together, they and corrections officer Edward (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) are deputized by the sheriff (Garry Pastore) to form a drug task force.
Upon the creation of this team, the three proceed to make a series of destructive and increasingly idiotic decisions. Adam chases down any vaguely suspicious-looking person while riding a four-wheeler. Hazel makes a hilariously ineffective single billboard at one end of the main street in town. Edward stops cars at the line entering the city and searches, without warrant or probable cause, every trunk of every vehicle. For a long time, it seems that the film at least partly supports their message of stopping the opioid threat by any means necessary. That can be attributed to a broad and nonspecific anger aimed toward an unchecked system, which ultimately makes victims of everyone —its abusers, those closest to them and even the people who try to make a difference.
This becomes blatantly obvious as the film enters its final act. One of this team of three is killed in a tragically avoidable shootout, and at this point, the movie performs a complete 180-degree turn in sympathetic perspective and thematic focus. If the point was pretty broad and more than a bit vague until now, the turns taken by the remaining heroes in this story certainly provide a specific clarity. They are also reprehensible, and the confused manner in which Folmar tries both to exonerate one character of, essentially, a negligent homicide and to acknowledge the moral morass of a world overtaken by fear is what leads to the story’s entire undoing. Shooting Heroin tries to say something about a national crisis, but it ends up imprecisely saying a whole lot of nothing.
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