PLOT: A world-weary and washed-up cop is given the mundane assignment of escorting a key trial witness from the police lockup to the courthouse, 16 blocks away. But the pair gets caught in a cat-and-mouse game that will ultimately give the down-and-out detective a shot at redemption.
Somebody needs to tell John McClane to lay off the sauce. And the cheeseburgers. And the existential despair.
Bruce Willis's unflattering paunch, police-issue 'stache and pronounced widow's peak in 16 Blocks are in sharp contrast to his lean, mean Die Hard days when he was McClane.
Director Richard Donner (Superman, Lethal Weapon) has mellowed with age too, crafting this thinking-man's one-cop-against-the-world thriller.
In 16 Blocks, Willis is washed-up NYPD detective Jack Mosley, the kind of guy whose main purpose in life is babysitting crime scenes and hitting the bottle at the crack of dawn. On one particularly fateful morning, Mosley is tasked with escorting a witness from the police lockup to the courthouse. Which, as you might have deduced, is 16 blocks away.
Turns out the witness, a nasal motormouth called Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), has actually been summoned to testify against a cabal of dirty policemen. Mosley finds this out the hard way, when the ringleader of the bad badges (David Morse, who always gives great villain) tries to kill Bunker, and, ultimately, the prisoner's unwilling guardian.
Although 16 Blocks doesn't fall cleanly into any of the typical cop movie pigeonholes, it borrows elements from so many of them that it's a patchwork of stuff that we've all seen before. You'll even smell the final convenient plot twist coming from a mile away.
Def, whose versatility as an actor will soon eclipse his accomplishments as a rapper, does an ace job with his relatively two-dimensional character, and Morse is perfectly intense as Jack's former partner turned nemesis.
Willis, for his part, leaves the trademark smirk at home, and we can almost believe he really is this tired, hollowed-out nobody, just as we can almost believe that's New York on the screen and not Toronto, where 16 Blocks was filmed last summer.
Because 16 Blocks never completely gives itself over to ludicrous action film cliches, other than that a cornered Jack and Eddie keep managing to elude a phalanx of experienced and heavily armed police officers, the movie feels surprisingly human, even gritty.
Sadly, it's not human and gritty enough that we'll take anything away from it after the neatly tied-up climax and epilogue play themselves out and the credits roll. By the time you drive the 16 blocks home from the theatre, everything but that creepy moustache will probably be forgotten.
BOTTOM LINE: A capable cop thriller with solid performances, 16 Blocks ultimately doesn't do anything to truly stand out from the classics of the genre. And will bad guys in movies never learn that no good comes from spilling your guts to the hero?
(This film is rated PG)
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