16 Blocks opens with jaunty Spanish music and a police raid, and it only gets stranger from there. Not strange as in "What is going on?" - strange as in "What does this movie want me to think?" And 16 Blocks definitely wants you to think; its characters aren't veering off on philosophical tangents about fate and personal change while being shot at by corrupt NYPD cops for their own benefit. But you're less likely to contemplate the movie's heavy-handed themes than what exactly they did to screw up this supposed-to-be action movie.
First, a quick summary: A police officer (Bruce Willis) is assigned to take a petty criminal (Mos Def) from lock-up to the courthouse (you guessed it, 16 blocks away) so he can testify in front of a jury. Unfortunately, some corrupt cops want this criminal dead, and they try to kill him en route. Our protagonists spend the movie fighting block by block to get to the courthouse.
The movie begins well enough, Bruce Willis limping onto the screen as Jack Mosley, an aged, balding, alcoholic officer of the NYPD. Anyone who has seen Willis' more recent movies, such as Sin City and Hostage, has to take a moment to marvel at how absolutely unappealing he comes off as here - he is still a cop, but he is not the gritty, strong anti-hero we have come to know and love. He's a nobody. He's sad, and he's kind of gross. It's a combination of good wardrobe and makeup and good acting -- a feat within itself. At the first sound of Mos Def's high and nasal voice, we know we're in for an equally surprising performance from him, too. As the nervous and chattering Eddie Bunker, he is obnoxious and impressively uncool. Even David Morse, unnervingly patronizing as Frank Nugent, the ringleader of the corrupt cops, is really pretty good.
Set up with no strong heroes, sympathetic main characters to rally around, or even entirely sinister villains to rally against, 16 Blocks spends the next hour and 45 minutes leading its audience through one uncertainty after another.
It isn't clear if the characters are supposed to be morally ambiguous or if the writer was just lazy, because we don't learn much about any of the characters -- why Mosley, a guy who always takes the easy way out, is helping Bunker at risk to his own life, what Bunker did to get arrested in the first place and what Nugent and the other corrupt cops did and want to cover up by stopping Bunker from testifying - until the last half hour. When we do finally find out that the good guys are really good and the bad guys are really bad, it's both disappointing and annoying (if it was good versus evil, couldn't they have just told us in the first place?).
The soundtrack is in constant conflict with the actual movie. In addition to the aforementioned jaunty Spanish music, some swelling orchestral music plays during what should be a very suspenseful moment. There is, of course, the standard action movie music, but it plays as much during genuinely tense scenes as it does when the characters are just walking around. Instead of getting riled up every time Mosley and Bunker take a stroll, it's a lot easier to distrust the music and get bored.
The writing suffers pretty horribly, too, and not because this is an action movie, but because it's trying to pretend it's something more. It's not even 15 minutes into the movie when Bunker starts philosophizing about signs and personality and change. We might let it go, since it's in keeping with the character's unending verbal spew -- but others fall prey to these same deep musings that are, like a sword, a bad idea to bring to a gunfight.
If the movie had embraced its B-movie story, it would have been fine -- and maybe if it had tried a little harder, or at least dropped the trite plot devices and cheap camera tricks, it could have been something more. But, as it is, 16 Blocks tries to be too many different things to manage to be simply entertaining.
