“Emergency”, on Amazon Prime Video: teenagers in trouble because of their skin color | REVIEW

Hollywood in recent years has shown itself to be increasingly aware of and committed to racism and its aftermath, approaching this problem from multiple angles and with diverse styles: the intensity of Ava DuVernay’s social dramas, the physical action in Ryan’s films Coogler, the twisted horror proposed by Jordan Peele. But not all of these approaches are necessarily successful, and an example of this is “Emergency”, a film by Carey Williams that starts from an interesting idea but ends up crashing against the wall of her own pretensions.

It is a film that adapts and extends a short film of the same name directed by Williams himself in 2018. And if the premise is of interest, it is because it turns the typical sitcom about a group of teenagers in search of of a night out. Unlike the uniform whiteness that usually show this type of film (from “American Pie” to “Superbad”, including the most recent “Booksmart”), “Emergencia” stars two young African-Americans and a Latino, who in their desire to have fun get into a mess upon finding a young white girl unconscious in her apartment.

What moves the plot of the film is the fear of these young people to report the case to the police and that, due to the color of their skin, they blame them for harming the girl. That pure and genuine fearwhich trigger situations of police abuse against racial minorities, provokes a cleverly veiled tension due to the vicissitudes and blunders faced by the protagonists on their way to fix the situation.

But if in its first half the comedy works with a good handling of skill and grace, in its second part the script begins to take itself too seriously, intensifying its drama unnecessarily, solemnizing the social dimension that was better undertaken from the subtlety. The final scene, which could easily have been left out of the footage, rounds out the feeling of having witnessed a film that sabotages itself too soon.

Qualification:

2.5/5