Maybe it’s a little early to proclaim a title as one of the year’s worst, but fangless horror flick Night Patrol aggressively makes its case quite strong. A total mess of a script from four different screenwriters—Tim Cairo, Jake Gibson, Shaye Ogbonna, and director Ryan Prows—has some clever messaging in mind. Unfortunately, it fails to rise above the basics of “all cops are bad.” One can draw that hypothesis from the film in the first fifteen minutes, let alone suffering through nearly two hours of relentless cruelty towards its marginalized people. Genre mainstay Justin Long has been positioned as Officer Ethan Hawkins, “one of the good guys” amongst an onslaught of literal bloodsucking cops. As lead character Wazi, RJ Cyler tries his best. Neither Cyler nor even Long’s commitment to the bit can manage to jump-start the narrative in an interesting way. Side-stepping its horror element almost completely until the final act, Night Patrol is a frustrating, disappointing attempt at Sinners fame.
Wazi starts off the film handcuffed to a table, forced to sign a document while he has some object protruding from out of his abdomen. From here, the story takes a turn back to show just how Wazi ended up in that dire predicament in the first place. The very same night he nabs his mother’s ring to propose to his girlfriend, tragedy ensues. A cop car pulls up behind their car, ending in a violent encounter that leaves Wazi’s love with a hole straight through her head. During this scene, another cop urges Ethan to shoot the woman if he wants in to the “Night Patrol.” This macabre initiation ritual is purposely cringey and uncomfortable, driven by real life reflections of police brutality. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie fails to succumb to even a shred of subtlety.
They have divided what remains into different chunks, labeled in pieces as if some prestige drama. For a significant stretch, Night Patrol functions primarily as a cop movie. Ethan delivers tone-deaf speeches about public distrust of police, participates in theatrical training demonstrations, and schemes with his partner, Xavier (Jermaine Fowler). The pacing drags as we linger on procedural beats that far overstay their welcome. For much of the runtime, the supernatural remains teased yet kept in the shadows. Dermot Mulroney’s Sarge character should have been a far greater presence. Wazi and his mother (Nicki Micheaux) ultimately become the emotional center. As the Night Patrol closes in, Wazi must fight to survive as the true vampiric nature of the police force has been nakedly displayed.
Shaky filmmaking does them no favors, especially when it takes so obscenely long to actually get past the obvious bullet points about cops that creatives underline over and over again. While its central ideas are compelling, they are handled with such blunt force that nuance has fully left the building. What remains is an uneven genre hybrid: a cop thriller first, a vampire flick second, and a political allegory scraping against the edges of a sub-par horror/thriller. Underneath all the meandering, there are glimmers of goodness. What kind of audience was this made for? Night Patrol struggles from the weight of its politics, eventually culminating in a bloody finale that inexplicably ends in a cliffhanger. Just watch Sinners instead.
Prepare for initiation into Night Patrol, exclusively in theaters on Friday, January 16th.
