While Wu-Tang founding member RZA’s previous films have shown something of a chasm between his uneven direction and his virtuosic body of work as a musician, he still possesses a stylish charm as a storyteller. For that reason, Cut Throat City’s elevator pitch, a post-Katrina heist film set in New Orleans, one featuring both T.I. and Terrance Howard as villains, was difficult to pass up. But the resulting film is disjointed to the point of dissonance, a missed opportunity with too few bright spots.
Those bright spots come rather early, in the film’s animated opening credits scene. It’s a bloody and provocative bit of pulp violence with a crew of young black men fighting back against authority, until it’s revealed to be a comic book drawn by leading man Blink (Shameik Moore). He’s showing his work off to his groomsmen on whom the fiction was based, on the day of his wedding. There’s aspiring rapper Miracle (Demetrius Shipp Jr), the reserved Andre (Denzel Whitaker), and Junior (Keean Johnson), the least well drawn of the four. In introducing the audience to the group’s dynamic, there’s an endearing quality to their banter, weaving in bits of their origins as homegrown N.O. boys excited about Blink’s nuptials with bride-to-be Lucinda (Eiza González).
But once the archival Katrina footage kicks in and the film time jumps to Blink and Lucinda struggling with their new child, and the rest of the group each feeling the financial hurt from living in a city the country practically wrote off, it seems like the movie is going to pivot into more noirish territory. It’s the perfect real world set-up motivation for a gripping heist thriller. Rather than split the distance between, say, F. Gary Gray’s Set it Off and Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, the ensuing criminal enterprise Blink and his friends embark upon is far from harrowing grit or genre fun.
There’s some initial political intrigue in their target, hitting up casinos the group sees as exploiting their city for Blink’s Cousin Bass (T.I.), especially once Ethan Hawke’s city councilman Symms gets involved in wanting them apprehended. But once the initial smash and grab goes awry, with casualties in the group, and being caught between the police and Bass, the film should be sprinting towards some kind of cathartic climax. Instead, the film limps along for far too long, growing ever more complicated by new players in the Louisiana politics and crime scenes, and moving the finale’s goalposts further and further away.
The screenwriting from newcomer Paul Cuschieri just isn’t up to snuff to balance so many spinning plates, even if a murderer’s row of supporting players like Hawke, Wesley Snipes (as Blink’s father) and Rob Morgan prop up what amounts to a short television series’ worth of plot stuffed into a two-hour-plus runtime. RZA and Cuschieri both gesture in the direction of meaningful social commentary as their leads plummet towards an inescapable hole of tragic comeuppance, but the movie’s cartoonish villain turns and mixed up crime fiction aesthetics make for too pulpy a film for any of the haphazard cinéma vérité to land.
Maybe RZA could have done more with a bigger budget, as this local story feels too unmoored from its surroundings, failing to capture the essence or vibe of New Orleans, either in scenery or believability in its cast’s supposed homegrown characters. When all is said and done, Cut Throat City is a great premise and a storied cast in search of a riveting script and a director to adequately bring it to life.
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