Body Cam (2020)
96 min.
Release Date: May 18, 2020 (Digital); June 2, 2020 (On Demand)
The best horror movies are about more than just blood and frights—fears, anxieties, social issues—and Jordan Peele has most recently made two of the most accomplished horror films that entertain and tap into something socially relevant. Mary J. Blige-starrer “Body Cam” has similar ambitions to make one stay woke, confronting police brutality and corruption in the form of a sobering procedural with a supernatural horror bent, but the film is just okay. In spite of effective moments and hard-hitting ideas, director Malik Vitthal and screenwriters Richmond Riedel and Nicholas McCarthy (2014’s “At the Devil’s Door”) aren't quite successful in blending the expected genre goods and worthwhile social consciousness in the execution.
Between losing her son in a drowning accident and then facing an eight-month suspension for striking a civilian, Louisiana police officer Renee Lomito (Mary J. Blige) has been in a tough headspace. Given the go-ahead to return to active duty, she is assigned to partner up with rookie Danny (Nat Wolff). Not too late into patrolling the night, they come across a stranded police cruiser, where Renee alone watches the dash-cam footage of her former partner (Ian Casselberry) pulling over a woman in a van without any plates and then being mysteriously yanked into the sky. Once the eviscerated body of the officer turns up, Renee realizes she needs to get to the bottom of the most recent string of killings that could be connected to a senseless crime.
Grisly and even involving at first, “Body Cam” ends up being pretty heavy-handed and cornball, and that’s the fact of the matter. (Although 2012’s gripping found-footage film “End of Watch” wasn’t really a horror film, it achieved more immediacy and tension than this one by putting the viewer directly into the line of duty next to LAPD officers.) Director Malik Vitthal does kick things off to a promisingly creepy start with his opening traffic-stop sequence, ratcheting tension on a rainy night to the rhythmic sound of windshield wipers and visualizing most of it through the ill-fated cop’s body cam. A sequence where Renee and Danny snoop through a ramshackle home at night meanders until reaching a hair-raisingly tense crescendo, and a quintuple-homicide set-piece in a convenience store is also suspenseful. Otherwise, director Vitthal falls back on flickering lights and the fuzzy, appearing-and-then-disappearing shadow of a hulking, Jason Voorhees-sized entity.
There is something already horrific about the injustices people of color face all too regularly that tagging on a supernatural element just seems to undercut—even cheapen—the impact of what writers Richmond Riedel and Nicholas McCarthy are trying to convey. One can start to put the pieces together before Renee does that the inevitable plot revelation can even be seen coming a mile away. Despite some questionable character motivations and stilted dialogue with which she's been saddled—“Something terrible happened, and I have to find out why”—Mary J. Blige puts in such valiant work as the grieving but steadfast Renee Lomito that one wouldn’t mind seeing her headline more genre fare. As “Body Cam” aims high but still never quite comes off as the powerful “Black Lives Matter” horror thriller that could have been, it is so much easier to admire the film more for what it strives to do than the actual results.
Grade: C
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