"Emergency" a potent, urgent flip side of the one-crazy-night romp

Emergency (2022)

If it were released two decades ago, a high-concept buddy comedy about three college guys of color finding a white teenage girl passed out on their floor would be played entirely for yuks. Today, it hits a little differently. That’s the premise behind “Emergency,” and while it does take the nature of this wildly spiraling ordeal quite seriously, it does begin like a one-crazy-night campus romp. It’s funny, until it’s not. Utilizing the hook of a classic teen sex comedy and showing the flip side of that formula to say something substantive, “Emergency” is a pointed, socially conscious yarn spun with enough curveballs to keep it riveting and plausible. 

Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) are best friends and seniors at Buchanan University. It’s about to be Spring Break, and Sean has the whole night planned out for a “legendary tour” of 7 parties. Being the brainy, more academic-focused one (Sean calls his pal “the Barack Obama of Fungus”), Kunle should be spending his night working on his biology thesis. Begrudgingly, Kunle goes along with the plan, even as he remembers that he forgot to lock the temperamental lab fridge with his mold experiment inside. Arriving back home at their apartment to pre-game, they find their door hanging open and a drunk white girl (Maddie Nichols) unconscious on their living room floor. What do they do now? 

Their fanny pack-wearing, granola bar-handy Latino roommate, Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), is obliviously playing video games upstairs. While Kunle knows they should call an ambulance, Sean reasons that they can’t call 9-1-1 these days—three men of color and one passed-out white girl wouldn’t look good for them—so their best option is to get this girl to the hospital themselves. Of course, once loading “Goldilocks” into Sean’s van with a broken tail light, the trio runs into a few obstacles along the way. Meanwhile, at a frat party, Maddy (Sabrina Carpenter) can’t find her underage sister Emma before she tracks Emma’s phone and goes on a mad goose chase. 

Commenting on the fear of doing the right thing with a wrong-place, wrong-time, it’s-not-what-it-looks-like situation, “Emergency” is harrowing and provocative. Director Carey Williams and screenwriter K.D. Dávila expand their 2018 short film of the same name (and with different actors), telling their story with unflashy energy while rooting it all in truth. The Black experience is given a snapshot here in even the smallest of details. Early on, there’s a fascinating scene in a classroom, where Kunle and Sean are put on the spot by a white British professor. She gives a trigger warning before uttering the “n” word, in the name of academia, and invites a discussion about why that word still holds power today. Kunle has less experience with hearing that word targeted at him, while Sean has heard it all too often. There’s also a scene, well into the film, where the boy trio pulls the van over until a white woman in a window spots them. She and her husband (who ironically have a “Black Lives Matter” sign in their yard) begin recording them, assuming they’re dealing drugs, and threaten to call the police. It’s sly-enough details like this that enhance what could have been heavy-handed and too didactic in lesser hands. 

On the most superficial level, "Emergency" recalls Greg Mottola’s smart, hilarious comedy “Superbad” if the world was still in 2007. We have the levelheaded hero and the irresponsible, out-to-have-a-good-time best friend going to a party (this time, 7 of them), and then a goofy third wheel comes into the picture. Kunle has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at Princeton, but he hasn’t told Sean. This is also a very similar plot point to one in “Superbad,” where Michael Cera’s Evan hadn’t yet told his best friend, Jonah Hill’s Seth, that he and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s Fogell/McLovin were already planning on rooming together in college. End of comparison. 

At the core of the film is Kunle and Sean’s friendship. This is vital, and newcomer Donald Elise Watkins and RJ Cyler (2021’s “The Harder They Fall”) are exceptional, ringing true as friends who are total opposites but loyal to one another. We root for them both to get out of this situation okay, and it’s rewarding to see both Kunle and Sean evolve; the compassionate Kunle reassesses his expectations of others after having first-hand experience and the street-smart Sean realizes he needs more responsibility in his life. Sebastian Chacon is also terrific, making Carlos such an endearing and wholesome gentleman when it comes to helping Emma and keeping his distance as he learns more about her. These characters could have easily just been types, but the actors flesh them out with personality and make them feel like lived-in people who exist beyond this one night.

What director Williams pulls off is a tough balance. As the stakes begin to feel even more real and edge toward tragedy or even a triggering trauma, the humor decreases, and yet the characters and the situations have all felt grounded the whole time without feeling like a whiplash-inducing tonal shift. After a rather intense end to the night, the final moments are smart and still powerful, wisely avoiding the patness of an Afterschool Special about racial ignorance and injustice. It might sound like bleak eat-your-vegetables fare, but “Emergency” is a potent and urgent film that should give some audiences a much-needed slap in the face. 

Grade: B +

Amazon Studios is releasing “Emergency” (105 min.) in select theaters on May 20, 2022 and on Prime Video on May 27, 2022.