What could have and should have been a lean mean socially-relevant cop thriller turns to indulgent putty in the hands of director Deon Taylor (The Intruder, Meet the Blacks.) Black and Blue hangs on but a single idea, one that James Moses Black’s Officer Brown conveys to his fellow pigmented protagonist Alicia West (Naomie Harris) early on in the film, “You’re not black anymore. You’re blue.” Meaning, the rookie cop should now identify as police, not African-American, because that is how the world sees her now. In the world Taylor creates, black and blue don’t mix.

This dichotomy of racial identity skewed by law enforcement affiliation is a potentially juicy angle to enter a cop drama but Black and Blue mostly fails to live up to its potential. Though the premise packs punch, the film doesn’t ever feel like it has much to say beyond “Cops are people too” and “Not all black people are criminals” and its level of racial analysis is just about as shallow as the various platitudes it deals so comfortably in.

That’s not to say that Black and Blue is an entire waste, as it pretty quickly abandons its deeper aspirations to deliver a meat and potatoes hero on the run narrative not without its own merits. When West, an Iraq war veteran and now-rookie police officer, witnesses a trio of narcotics officers gangland assassinating low-level drug dealers, capturing the whole thing on her body cam, she finds herself without anyone to turn to. With crooked cops hunting her down to secure evidence of their wrongdoing that would surely send them to prison, West becomes trapped in a historically rough New Orleans neighborhood, one particularly unfriendly to police presence, and must turn to the only person she knows: old acquaintance and shopkeeper Milo (Tyrese Gibson).

Taylor does a decent job staging surface-level thrills, delivering a number of messy shoot-outs, various foot races, and uncomfortable beat downs, but Black and Blue rarely drips with tension. The scenes that pack the most stakes are those where white police officers get a whisper away from black characters, but these moments can feel a bit exploitative; using real-world horrors to imply racial violence. As far as the plot is concerned, everything feels pretty damn humdrum and safe with very few surprises baked in. Frank Grillo can rage and scream all he wants but that fails to convince audiences that his crooked officer is going to best the literal social justice warrior we’re rooting for.

[Naomie Harris crashed our ‘Top Ten Best Films of 2016’ co-starring in ‘Moonlight‘, see where it ranked]

Where Black and Blue really delivers though is in the performances. With Academy Award-nominee Naomie Harris, who has worked in big event films like the 007 franchise (as Moneypenny) to major awards numbers like Moonlight, at the forefront, Black and Blue has at least something to brag about under the hood. Harris really does put her best foot forward as a police officer struggling for both her own life and a larger sense of justice but there’s not a ton of complexity to her character, nor does the film take advantage of her military training in ways that you might hope for and could have really elevated the film or, in the very least, made it more fun.

Harris is matched by possibly a career-best performance from Gibson, who offers an unusually restrained turn as a man under the heel of routine racial profiling. The rest of the supporting cast is mostly filled out by dirty cops and grill-wearing gangsters, played to type by the likes of Frank Grillo, Beau Knapp, James Moses Black, Mike Colter, and Reid Scott, with Taylor assembling a worthy crew to root against but, again, falling short of going beyond cliches associated with the “dirty cop” or “aggrieved criminal”.

Dean Taylor’s movies tend to be about one thing. They’re pulpy and one-dimensional and, lately, paired to performances that far out-pace the scripts. Like The Intruder before it, Black and Blue seems like an intriguing blueprint that fails to capitalize on what could have been, simply content to follow the suit of prior movies of similar stripes. While it pays lip service to the grandiose idea of “being the change”, Taylor’s film remains utterly stagnant. If Black and Blue had managed to be both a bust-em-up, knock-em-down action thriller that mixes in thoughtful race analysis, this could have been a campy and perhaps even thoughtful cinematic delight. Instead, it’s mostly a secondhand cop-out; a “Training Day for Dummies.”

CONCLUSION: Director Deon Taylor delivers his second almost-good-but-not-quite-there-yet motion picture of 2019, resting too much weight on his completely competent actors’ shoulders to elevate shlocky, lowbrow material. And once again, it doesn’t really work.