This movie was a crock from the start. The writer Price is some white liberal who anointed himself as an interpreter of inner city blacks to us ignorant white yahoos. His previous venture was the better "Clockers", which was made into a lame movie by Spike Lee. In a country where the two latest racial flaps were a black whore falsely accusing 3 frat boys of rape and that case dragged on for a year in spite of the fact EVERY shred of evidence pointed to their innocence and the woman changed her story with the weather. Don't forget how every white academic liberal and their black studies cohort spewed venom on the students based on the old ante-bellum "slaves being raped by massa" myth, which goes against reality where there are 112 black on white rapes for every case of the reverse. Or the Jena 6 case where six violent black youths beat a white kid silly. But since some nooses were hung months earlier, which had nothing to do with either race or the kid they beat, the black power movement and the white liberal drones descended on Jena to exonerate the punks and excoriate the town. But, in their defense, I do add that attempted murder was too steep a charge, but those Jena 6 punks belong in jail, not addressing the NAACP or appearing on BET.
Back to the movie, this wigged out white mother, Julianne Moore, claimed she was carjacked and her kid was taken from her, and this happened in the projects. She is no racist, as a matter of fact she works in the same project in the day care center, along with her son who is in the class. So naturally everyone goes haywire trying to find the kid. There are shades of the 1994 Susan Smith case, the murdering Southern mom who killed her kids then tried to blame it on a black man. But, as I remember, the police never bought her story and never shut down a project either. Her brother is a white cop in the neighboring working class suburb. Natch, he's a racist and angry as heck. Yet even he thinks his sister is a loser who is hiding something. So the suburban cops buffalo themselves into the city and shut down the project This is the first bit of unreality. As if the city and the mayor are going to put up with this. As if ten thousand lawyers, civil rights protesters, Sharpton rabble rousers and Nation of Islam thugs wouldn't descend on this city in a matter of hours; this in the middle of New Jersey not the Sudan, in 1999, not 1949. That alone makes most of the other racial drama superfluous. Then there is the other persistent whine about "Our black kids go missing and you do nothing, but when a white kid goes missing....", like the black on black crime whine(as if black on white crime is acceptable), this falls on deaf ears to me since it is the criminal street code of silence and the horrid conditions of black inner city "families" that hinder solving and creates the conditions for those crimes and tragedies.
The movie quickly devolves into an almost father - daughter relation between Detective Council, Sam Jackson, and the distraught mother Brenda Martin, played by Julianne Moore. Credit must be given to Ms. Moore for her thankless performance of a really messed up woman, as well as to Edie Falco, who played a woman who finds lost children and helps crack the case. Samuel Jackson played the requisite strong black guy who sets all the racist whites, as well as his brood in the projects, straight. He even had a chance to quell the requisite racial confrontation in the end by telling everyone the case was solved, but that would have been too simple. I wonder if all those black cops in New Orleans, the ones who looted and abandoned their posts during the flood or committed violent crimes on the side should invite him in as a role model? He even has a nice working class white guy cop sidekick, William Forsythe, just to make us trailer trash feel a little better about themselves, "Find a strong black man to teach you and you can be enlightened as I am", is what the writer seems to be saying through him. As a missing child case, this might had made a good Lifetime movie. But with the hyped up, dishonestly created racial tension as the theme, it is an exercise in affirmative action film-making designed to elicit outrage when none was called for.
