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| This tall-lettered poster for Richard Donner's 16 Blocks presents the almost real-time cop action-thriller effectively but without much color |
A police witness needs to be moved 16 blocks to a court house in New York City. The cop in charge faces serious resistance working against his completing the seemingly simple job.
Bruce Willis (Die Hard (1988)) is excellent as a troubled NYC cop, who for some unknown reason is also a burned-out alcoholic. David Morse (The Hurt Locker (2008)) is equally great as his opponent. 16 Blocks has a good anti-hero/anti-villain quality to it, which is refreshing in the superhero-age of the 00s (which still continues today.) The film also has an exciting hostage scene in a bus.
Though praised elsewhere, Mos Def (The Italian Job (2003)), who now goes by the name Yasiin Bey, plays the central witness in the film as a stereotype of a retarded African-American criminal in my opinion. This stereotype drags the film down immensely, as he is in almost the entire movie. SPOILER Another problem is that the ending of 16 Blocks is cheesy.
Master filmmaker Richard Donner (The Omen (1976)) has made the somewhat similar Lethal Weapon films (1987, '89, '92 and '98) with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover that are in some of the cases better than this, which seems to be his last film. 16 Blocks is written by Richard Wenk (The Equalizer (2014)).
Watch the trailer for the movie here
Cost: 55 mil. $
Box office: 65.6 mil. $
= Big flop (returned 1.19 times the cost)
[16 Blocks premiered 27 February (New York) and runs 110 minutes. It was shot in New York, Los Angeles and in Toronto, Ontario from April - June 2005 with re-shoots in July 2005. It opened #2, behind holdover hit Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion, to an 11.8 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent one more week in the top 5 (#4) and grossed 36.8 mil. $ (56.1 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 4.2 mil. $ (6.4 %) and Mexico with 2.6 mil. $ (4 %). Roger Ebert gave the film a 3/4 star review, translating to a notch better than this one. 16 Blocks reportedly heaved in an impressive 51.5 mil. $ on DVD and Blu-ray sales, which would change its status to merely a flop if figured in. It is Donner's last film. Willis returned with a voice performance in Over the Hedge (2006), That '70s Show Special: The Final Goodbye (2006, TV special) and theatrically in the flesh in Fast Food Nation (2006); Def in Journey to the End of the Night (2006); and Morse in A.W.O.L (2006, short), House (2006-07) and theatrically in Hounddog (2007). 16 Blocks is rotten at 56 % with a 5.9/10 critical averate at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of 16 Blocks?
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