Watch Cut Throat City with film summary and movie review

The result is a sprawling urban drama with eruptions of violence. It provides the intrigue that fans want from the heist genre while anchoring its twists in details about life in New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina—a disaster that was bungled by every level of government, and treated by corporations and real estate companies as a pretext to gentrify the city and drive out as many poor Black people as possible. Working from a screenplay by Paul Cuschieri, RZA and his collaborators take their sweet time building out supporting characters, and letting them them talk about systemic racism, capitalism, gentrification, and the relationship between art and life, on top of all the questions about who owes whom and what’ll happen if they don’t pay up. It’s a film in nonstop conversation with movie history, American history, and itself.

The film’s main character, Blink (Shameik Moore), is our guide through a story that immediately announces itself as something more than a cinematic cash grab. The first third is an account of swaggering young men struggling to make their way in a world that feels heightened but not unreal. The prologue is set before Katrina makes landfall. Blink gets married to his girlfriend Demeyra (Kat Graham). His pal Andre (Denzel Whitaker), a jazz musician, plays trumpet during the couple’s first dance. We also meet Miracle (Demetrius Shipp, Jr.), a pride-driven hothead, and Junior (Keann Johnson), who loves his attack-trained dog more than he loves most people. RZA and Cuschieri build out the core characters’ environment in short scenes that pack a lot of information into a few lines and gestures. By the time the levees break, we’re fully invested, even though we know from the movie’s description that these guys aren’t going to end up volunteering for the Red Cross.

Blink, Miracle, Andre, and Junior live in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, a predominantly poor, Black neighborhood that was treated as an afterthought by the city even before the flood waters rose. They’re street-level drug dealers, working territory ruled by Cousin Bass (rapper-produer-actor TI, in an indelible supporting performance that holds its own with against heavy-hitting character actors). A sense of frustration and depression runs beneath every deal. Blink and company would gladly do something else if it paid as much as dealing. But guys like these don’t get jobs like that in post-Katrina New Orleans. They didn’t get them before the storm, either—especially if they came from the 9th Ward.

As in other socially conscious thrillers—a description that covers everything from pre-World War II James Cagney star vehicles like “The Roaring Twenties” and “Angels with Dirty Faces” to more recent pictures like “Dead Presidents,” “Belly,” “Set if Off,” and “Widows”—this movie makes sure that the criminal exploits occur within a context that explains (but does not justify) the characters’ choices. “Cut Throat City” is fully aware that it is trying to eat its cake and have it, too, like almost every other crime or gangster film. It builds that contradiction into the characters’ dialogue, a torrent of words that often have a musical or evangelical rhythm. The talk focuses on who the characters are and what they want or need, which is at should be. But it always circles back to systemic racism and poverty; multigenerational (and racially diverse) civic corruption; and a national mindset that teaches Americans that if you can only get rich and/or powerful enough, by any means necessary, the law won’t be able to touch you anymore, and all of the inequities that you grew up with won’t matter.

In the animated opening credits sequence, a face off between white racists and Black gangstas turns spectacularly gory—like the O-Rin Ishi sequence in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” but more knowingly silly. Turns out the images come from Blink’s own pen. He’s a comic book artist who keeps getting turned down for paid jobs, ostensibly because his material isn’t “relatable” enough, but really because the industry’s gatekeepers are upper-middle class white men who can’t relate to Blink. After Blink’s rejection, he commiserates with his three closest friends in the back of Junior’s van, smoking weed and drinking beer. 

Their conversation covers Blink’s work, his influences, and the question of how to make a story both heightened and believable. “That shit fake, but you can feel the realness in the Mafia motherfuckers,” Blink says. “It doesn’t have to be this over-the-top Tarantino shit.” This comes across as a jab at Tarantino, who hired RZA to help supervise the soundtrack to “Kill Bill,” but it ultimately feels self-deprecating: some of the violence has a QT feeling, particularly the fate of a man who loses a bet with Cousin Bass on a cage fight between raccoons and doesn’t have the money to pay up.  

Inspired by Cousin Bass’ nihilistic sureness and serpent-tongued eloquence, the foursome hatches a scheme to steal Federal Emergency Management Association checks—figuring they’re mainly going to white people and corporations anyway, not to the 9th Ward—then expands to knocking off casinos and banks. Their crimes rouse the fury of a former corrupt cop turned city councilman, Jackson Symms (Ethan Hawke). Symms pressures police detective Lucina Valencia (Eiza González) to crack the case fast so that real estate investors won’t pull out of a city that’s beginning to “recover,” i.e. inspire outsiders to buy up now-cheap land. 

Of course, there are a few details that don’t add up, and in time, Blink starts to notice them and wonder what they mean. Cops arrived at the first robbery so fast that it seemed like they were tipped off, and nobody seriously really went looking for the gang afterward, even though they started a gunfight on a city street and made off with $150,000 (or so the local newspaper claims). As Blink and company balance their desire to stay out of prison with personal commitments that keep them in town, the film spends more time with its supporting cast, which includes Isaiah Washington as a crooked funeral home director who blows smoke at men who threaten him; Terrence Howard as The Saint, a top boss with a smirky, insinuating manner who thinks he’s the pope of sin; and Rob Morgan as Courtney, a corrupt cop who used to work with Symms and has one foot in law enforcement and the other in street crime. Symms’ anguished monologue in a cemetery is a highlight, practically a short film in itself, and perhaps a deep-cut cinephile in-joke: Hawke played Hamlet on film 20 years ago. 

“Cut Throat City” is hampered by its slack storytelling rhythm, which verges on indulgent even though the movie repeatedly warned us that it wasn’t going to be in a rush to get to the next plot point. There are other problems as well. Moore’s hero is the only lead character who feels fully thought-out; the rest are defined by one or two traits, such as Andre’s love of the trumpet and discomfort with violence, and Junior’s devotion to his friend and his dog. Gonzalez’s committed performance as the detective never overcomes the pervasive sense that the role was miscast. She’s too young to project the sort of assurance that would make somebody like Courtney or Symms think twice before sassing her. The bits of physical business that seem calculated to make the character seem more edgy and world-weary (like her De Niro-style head-tilts and cigarette habit) only underscore the problem. More care in the writing and casting might’ve put this movie over the top. 

But the sum is still a substantial work, worth seeing and talking about, and made with sincerity and imagination. Photographed by Brandon Cox and edited by Joe D’Augustine and Chris Berkenkamp, “Cut Throat City” makes smart use of New Orleans locations, steering clear of tourist landmarks. Cox’s nighttime photography is vibrantly seedy, favoring hellish reds and cool blues. Costume designer Gina Ruiz makes sure that every big-name supporting actor has a look so vivid that you could sketch it from memory. (Best in show is the Saint’s introductory ensemble: a white dress shirt and pants, brown leather suspenders, Mardi Gras beads, a red bowtie and armbands, and a Panama hat with a sherbet orange band.) The dialogue is packed with quotable bits, from the description of bayou mosquitoes “so large they could stand flat-footed and fuck a turkey” to a character’s insistence that “we can see further through our tears than through the lens of a telescope.”

One of the most striking things about “Cut Throat City” is how the foursome’s progress through the underworld seems less urgent as the tale unfolds. This, too, is by design. Part of the film’s point is that—to mangle the most famous “Casablanca” quote—the armed robberies of four young men don’t amount to a hill of beans in a city (and a country) that thinks freedom means that you never have to be held accountable. By the end, the film that “Cut Throat City” most resembles is “Chinatown,” with a key difference: there’s no deep, dark, secret conspiracy for anybody to expose, beyond a few logistical or procedural details kept hidden to keep the money flowing. The moral and political rot is right there on the surface where everyone can see it. 

Nobody in this movie loses their innocence. There’s no innocence to lose.