Apparently, the policemen in New York City just can't fly straight. They either have troubled pasts, dark presents, or full blown felonious futures -- at least, if you believe the movies. In films such as Prince of the City, Brooklyn's Finest,...heck, even Maniac Cop, those empowered to enforce the law are, more often than not, breaking it themselves. It's become a dopey dramatic given. We can now add Dito Montiel's The Son of No One to the list of sour supports. For the director behind such 'small' pictures as The Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and Fighting, this is a major mainstream leap forward. The casting alone bubbles high above the marquee. Sadly, Montiel's own suspect skills undermine anything enjoyable or entertaining.
When he was a troubled adolescent, Jonathan White (Channing Tatum) lived in a disenfranchised Queens neighborhood and was best friends with the troubled Vinny (Tracey Morgan). One day, a fatal incident changed their lives, and the life of Detective Charles Stanford (Al Pacino) forever. Fast forward to 2002 and White is now a cop, being transferred back to the same area. Suddenly, he starts getting blackmail threats about the past and discovers that an eagle-eyed reporter (Juliette Binoche) is reopening the deadly case he was involved in. Under the leadership of a corrupt captain, Marion Mathers (Ray Liotta), White is put in charge of the investigation. As luck would have it, things aren't much better at home, as a sick child and an angry wife (Katie Holmes) threaten to dismantle the last vestiges of our hero's existence.
With The Son of No One, it's time to coin a new cinematic subgenre label -- the policeboiler. While it wants to be a harrowing whodunit (or perhaps, a better way of saying it is "who's doing it") with spikes of realistic metropolitan grit, it ends up a high pitched melodrama with screamed speeches substituting for authenticity or emotion. This entire exercise is a soap opera that thinks it's Serpico. Montiel clearly believes that his own personal past makes him the perfect candidate to capture New York's sinister underbelly. Too bad it didn't prepare him for an equally skilled life behind the lens. From oddball creative choices to characters that go nowhere, this is one filmmaker who can't quite get the hang of what the artform actually needs. Throwing known faces at an audience does not a valid set of choices make.Tatum is his typical stone faced self, a block of inert blandness that seems stuck in one mode -- comatose. Even when he's angry he barely registers the rage. Of course, with all the scenery chewing going on around him, he doesn't really need to act. Pacino and Liotta are so stuffed full of drywall they should spit sawdust. Into this mess sits a wholly out of place Binoche, a baffling Morgan, and a try-as-she-might Ms. Holmes. While the framing often misses its marks and the compositions confuse, Montiel believes he is lifting the lid off of the whole crime and corruption core of any big city. What he's really doing, however, is repeating the same things we've seen dozens of times before, and doing it in a wholly uninvolving way.
In fact, by the time The Son of No One mounts its awkward finale and epilogue, the unruly sum has smothered any value in the often dispirit parts. We walk away dazed, confused, and drained of any desire to revisit this type of material again. It's the rare movie that can both forge a new subgenre and spoil the original source all at once. The Son of No One is clearly an experience for same.
