In short: Linewatch (2008)

Michael Dixon (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has been working for the US Border Patrol at the US/Mexican border for too long, it seems. He doesn’t seem completely cynical but he’s certainly not happy with a world where desperately poor people trying to make their way to a mildly less horrible life are preyed upon by human traffickers who don’t care about their lives as well as by right wing militias/future Trump voters who sound as if they believe shooting brown people is some kind of sport. His mood and his week certainly don’t improve when what looks like a minor drug raid leads to a shoot-out (during which his partner is shot but surprisingly enough not killed). Worse still, one of the drug runners is a guy Michael knows.

You see, a few decades ago, Michael was a gang member known as Mad Mike, and the guy is one of his former buddies. And he’s not the last one of them Michael will meet, either. Our protagonist is soon visited by half a dozen of them, lead by his old frenemie Kimo (Omari Hardwick). Turns out Michael’s little shootout got in the way of a meet-up between Kimo’s people and their drug suppliers from south of the border. They want Michael to help them set up a new meeting where nobody will disturb them. If he isn’t amenable, why, he has a nice little family now, wouldn’t it be horrible if something happened to them?

Of course, things won’t go too well for anyone involved in the end.

Linewatch by Kevin Bray is a film I’ve mostly seen critically slaughtered on the Net. Perhaps at that stage of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career, quite a few people were still expecting Oscar-baiting films from him, when clearly that kind of role either didn’t come to him anymore or wasn’t of interest? This certainly isn’t the kind of film that will win anyone any Academy Awards, nor is it one many professional critics looking for one will love.

After all, apart from its surprising compassion for the people trying to make it over the border, this is very much your typical film about a man haunted by his criminal past who will only get rid of it by killing a lot of people he once saw as family, and now can see rather more clearly as dysfunctional and abusive.

Me, as a man with simple tastes, do enjoy a competent stew of battered old tropes like this quite a bit, particularly since Bray knows how to set up an action sequence properly, and never falls into the action movie automatism of having to include one shoot-out every seven point five minutes. That would be a waste of a perfectly good Cuba Gooding Jr., and a whole handful of decent to good (mostly black) character actors, after all, so we also get quite a few moments of the characters acting like old friends who probably never liked each other all that much. There’s even a pretty clearsighted portrayal of the way a gang might work as a (dysfunctional) family unit included, and while that wasn’t exactly news in 2008 either, it certainly adds to the film’s feeling of veracity.


Which isn’t too bad of an achievement for a film hardly anybody seems to respect.