Movie Review: David Morse in 16 Blocks - Page 2

Initially Jack, though disgusted with the cops and himself for betraying their mission, assumes that Eddie, the beneficiary of his daring, is ironically unworthy of it, an inevitable recidivist. As the day wears on, however, Jack discovers that Eddie was wrongfully accused of the crime that put him in prison; nor did he know that the man he was testifying against was a cop (which is irrelevant except to audience members likely to allow cops wide latitude in dealing with criminals and who might otherwise think of Eddie as a snitch).

Eddie is the product of foster care and longs to make good by opening a birthday-cake bakery. He's a hard-luck kid, with amusingly elliptical thinking and reactions and a trick nasal voice that Mos Def uses comically to slur the rhythm of his scenes. As Eddie, Mos Def is as much on his own adolescent-misfit's planet as Jerry Lewis was, and, like Lewis's well-meaning simpletons, he's both cranky and a sweetie.

Frank is the point man for the killing, so now the former partners are pitted against each other, with Frank (wrongly) assuming that Jack is long past being able to pull off what he's attempting. Frank and Jack have three major confrontations: when Frank shows up in the bar to take care of Eddie; when they're trapped in a basement on opposite sides of a wall with guns pointed at each other; and when Jack has spirited Eddie to safety and shows up in the court house garage intending to testify himself, though it will besmirch the department (in the process of cleansing it, of course) and even send Jack himself to prison.

I go into this amount of detail not because it's interesting, but to lay out the conventional symbolic structure of the plot beneath the pseudo-naturalistic frankness about big-city police forces. Simply put, Jack is a sinful knight in need of redemption. The main villain is his partner, which is to say his fraternal twin: in the course of the movie Jack, the part of the soul that can be saved, has to reject and battle against Frank, the part of the soul that can't. The soul's struggle against the temptation to do evil is thus personified and externalized in the good cop-bad cop showdown.

Jack and Frank, both of them criminal cops, are paired like the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus. One of the malefactors rails against Jesus while the other rebukes his fellow ("Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss") and is saved (Luke 23:39-43).

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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