If you love endless shootouts where nobody can aim, Ben Dover has found your new favorite disaster!
If you’re flipping through the local papers looking for a nice, relaxing way to spend a Tuesday night on your sofa, you might want to keep turning past the streaming menu this week. Nicolas Cage is back, and no, he’s not hunting for the Declaration of Independence or flying on a plane full of convicts. This time around, he’s playing a weary, close-to-retirement police officer in 211, a movie that attempts to turn a routine bank heist into a massive, explosive spectacle but mostly succeeds in giving the audience a massive, pounding headache.
Directed by York Shackleton, this film is loosely based on the real-life 1997 North Hollywood shootout, though it treats history with about as much respect as a teenager treats their parents’ curfew. It follows Cage’s character as he accidentally drives right into the middle of a highly organized, heavily armed bank robbery. Expect lots of yelling, a staggering amount of wasted ammunition, and the kind of shaky camera work that makes you wonder if the cameraman was riding a unicycle. It is available right now on your various streaming devices, assuming you want to waste the electricity.
Review by Ben Dover
Alright, let’s get into it. I’ve lived six decades on this planet, and I’ve seen some bad movies, but 211 is a special kind of disaster. The title comes from the police code for a robbery, which is fitting because I feel like this movie personally robbed me of 86 minutes of my life that I am never getting back. Nic Cage plays Mike Chandler, a cop who is about two days away from retirement, because of course he is. That is the oldest cliché in the book! Why can’t a cop ever get into a shootout on their first day? Or their eleventh year? It is always the guy who just bought a condo in Florida and is packing his cardboard boxes.
To make matters worse, the movie forces him to take a ride-along. And not just any ride-along, but a modern teenager named Kenny, played by some kid named Michael Rainey Jr. This kid got sent on a ride-along because he got into a fight at school, which apparently in today’s world means you get to sit in a police cruiser instead of getting detention. Kenny spends the first half of the movie sulking and staring at his smartphone, which I’m pretty sure is glued to the hands of every human being under the age of 25. I don’t understand these kids today. Back in my day, if you got into trouble, you cleaned the garage. You didn’t get to go ride shotgun with Nicolas Cage while mercenaries shoot up the town.
Speaking of the bad guys, they are a bunch of disgruntled former military mercenaries who are angry about some stolen money in Afghanistan. They show up in this fictional city of “Chesterford” looking like they crawled out of a discount video game. They start shooting up a bank with automatic weapons, and the local cops show up with regular old pistols and act completely shocked that they are outgunned. It takes about forty minutes of movie time for anyone to realize they should probably call for backup. The tactics in this movie are so bad they made me want to scream. Cops are standing out in the open, taking cover behind car doors that offer about as much protection as a wet piece of cardboard.
The whole thing is just a messy, loud, incoherent disaster. It tries to be a gritty, serious thriller like Heat, but it ends up looking like a cheap straight-to-video bargain bin special. Nic Cage doesn’t even do his fun, crazy screaming routine that usually makes his bad movies entertaining. He just looks tired. Honestly, I don’t blame him. I was tired just watching it. If you see this on your Netflix or Amazon Prime queue, do yourself a huge favor and click on literally anything else. Even a documentary about paint drying would have a better narrative structure.
The Star Studded Cast (Sort Of)
- Nicolas Cage (Mike Chandler): The man, the myth, the guy who never says no to a paycheck. Cage plays our main cop. He tries to bring some dignity to the role, but he mostly just looks like he forgot where he parked his car. He does a lot of heavy breathing and squinting.
- Michael Rainey Jr. (Kenny Rastell): The teenager who gets dragged into the mess. He spends most of the movie looking terrified in the back of a police car, which is fair, but his character is so whiny it’s hard to root for him.
- Sophie Skelton (Lisa Chandler): She plays Mike’s pregnant daughter, who also happens to be married to Mike’s police partner. Because when you’re writing a script this lazy, you have to make sure every single character is related to keep the plot moving.
- Dwayne Cameron (Mac Chandler): Mike’s son-in-law and partner. He gets shot pretty early on and spends the rest of the movie bleeding out, which honestly seemed like a better deal than having to deliver any more of the dialogue.
Special Effects and Music
The special effects in this movie are an absolute joke. They used computer-generated muzzle flashes for the guns, and it looks like something a high schooler made on their laptop. Real guns smoke and have a kick; these look like plastic toys with little orange lights blinking at the end of the barrel. The blood splatters are also completely digital and look incredibly fake. Whenever someone gets shot, it looks like a red smudge from a MS Paint program just pops onto the screen.
As for the music, it is just a generic, pounding wall of synthesizer noise that tries to force you to feel suspense because the director didn’t know how to build it naturally. It’s loud, it’s annoying, and it gave me a ringing in my ears that lasted longer than the actual movie credits.
Star Rating
1 out of 5 Stars. I’m giving it one star only because the movie eventually ended and allowed me to go to bed.
Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
The movie opens in Afghanistan, where a group of heavily armed mercenaries murder a wealthy businessman because he cheated them out of their money. Cut to Chesterford, a generic American city. We meet Mike Chandler, a lonely widower cop whose daughter Lisa is pregnant but won’t talk to him because he was always too busy with work. Lisa is married to Mike’s partner, Mac.
Meanwhile, a high school kid named Kenny gets bullied and punches a guy. The school principal, instead of suspending him, decides the best punishment is a police ride-along. Kenny gets assigned to Mike and Mac’s car. At the exact same time, those mercenaries from the beginning show up in town to rob a specific bank that holds the money they want. They set off a bomb across town as a distraction, which draws away most of the police force.
Mike, Mac, and Kenny happen to drive right past the bank just as the robbers are walking in. Mac sees something suspicious and goes to investigate. The robbers immediately open fire with high-powered assault rifles. Mac gets hit and is trapped on the ground. Mike gets pinned down behind his police cruiser with the teenager, Kenny, stuck in the back seat. What follows is a massive, prolonged shootout where the mercenaries fire thousands of rounds of ammunition but somehow manage to miss the main characters who are barely hiding behind a car.
The rest of the police force slowly catches on and arrives at the scene, only to get instantly gunned down by the mercenaries. Inside the bank, the robbers are having trouble getting the vault open and start fighting among themselves. Outside, Mike realizes he has to save his son-in-law and protect the kid. He manages to sneak around, kill a couple of the bad guys, and eventually, the SWAT team shows up to finish off the rest. The head bad guy tries to use Kenny as a shield, but Mike shoots him. Mac survives, Mike reconciles with his daughter at the hospital, and Kenny learns that maybe cops aren’t so bad after all. It’s a cookie-cutter ending to a completely hollow movie.
5 Famous Quotes
- “I’m too old for this.” (Classic. Original. Groundbreaking.)
- “We have an active shooter situation, repeat, we have a 211 in progress!”
- “Keep your head down, kid, and don’t look out the window!”
- “They have military-grade weapons, we are completely outgunned!”
- “I need to get to my partner, he’s bleeding out over there!”
5 Interesting Movie Notes
- The film is loosely based on the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, which was one of the bloodiest police confrontations in American history. This movie handles that legacy with the subtlety of a monster truck rally.
- Nicolas Cage actually broke his ankle during the filming of this movie while shooting an action scene in Bulgaria, which shut down production for several weeks. I bet his ankle hurt less than my eyes did watching the final cut.
- The movie was filmed almost entirely in Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria, despite being set in a fictional city in the United States. You can tell because the “American” streets look strangely European and clean.
- The director, York Shackleton, is a former professional snowboarder. He should probably get back on the slopes because filmmaking does not seem to be his calling.
- Despite being a movie about a massive bank heist, the plot never really explains how the bad guys expected to get away clean after blowing up half the city block.
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