Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ryan Prows
Starring: Jermaine Fowler, Justin Long, Freddie Gibbs, RJ Cyler, YG, Nicki Micheaux, Flying Lotus, Phil Brooks, Dermot Mulroney
"Vampire cops" seems like such an obvious concept for a horror movie that you can't help but wonder why it hasn't been employed since (to my knowledge at least) 1990's long forgotten straight to video horror comedy Vampire Cop. We got werewolf cops in 1993's Full Eclipse, but anyone eager for some bloodsucking Five-Os has had to wait decades for the release of director Ryan Prows' Night Patrol.
Unfortunately it's a half-baked attempt to combine horror with social commentary that misses the mark on every level. Had it not gone into production at the same time as Sinners you might think it a lame attempt to piggy back that movie's success. No horror/action hybrid that climaxes with a stand-off between vampire cops and a united faction of Bloods and Crips has any right to be this dull.
Prows' film kicks off in promising fashion, evoking the mood of the LA gang movies of the early '90s as we meet Wazi (RJ Cyler), a young man from a Crip neighbourhood who is in a Romeo and Juliet-esque relationship with Primo (Zuri Reed), the sister of Blood leader Bornelius (Freddie Gibbs). Their secret clandestine meeting is disturbed by the arrival of a group of cops, one of whom, Ethan (Justin Long), executes Primo before Wazi makes his getaway.
The shooting was Ethan's initiation into "Night Patrol," a special unit of the LAPD that operates under cover of night, focussing on disrupting gang activity. Ethan believes Night Patrol was involved in his father's death and wants to infiltrate the unit. What he doesn't realise is that the members of Night Patrol are vampires who use their job to feed off LA's African-American community.
It's a great setup but Night Patrol quickly goes off the rails as it complicates its elevator pitch premise with various unsatisfying subplots. Along with Ethan and Wazi's storylines, we also follow Wazi's older brother Xavier (Jermaine Fowler), a Crip turned cop who just happens to be Ethan's new rookie partner, and their mother, Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux), an African occultist who has long suspected the supernatural lies behind the LAPD's targeting of her community.
Night Patrol is a movie in search of a protagonist, flipping between four different characters, most of whom are ultimately rendered inconsequential. Ethan is particularly confusing, as even though we witness him execute a young woman in cold blood the movie attempts to give him a completely unearned redemption arc. Similarly, Ayanda does something that's difficult to swallow and makes it impossible to take the character as seriously as the film would like.
Night Patrol's vampire villains are equally poorly defined. Aside from the bloodsucking metaphor, they could have been switched with practically any other mythological monster. We're left questioning the practicality of how these cops are able to avoid daylight and how their many crimes have gone undetected in an age when everyone has a camera in their pocket. It makes sense that they would feed off lower class African-Americans whose deaths won't attract much scrutiny, but why does Night Patrol only accept white people into its ranks, and why are there no female vampires? The film's blunt racial politics aren't helped by the stereotypical portrayal of its black characters, and the loaded white-on-black violence comes off as crudely exploitative.
But Night Patrol's biggest crime is that despite its knockout premise, it's incredibly boring. The characters are all so poorly written that we can't invest in any of them, and for all the subplots the movie spins it all winds up with a poorly staged shootout that plays like a Z-grade John Carpenter tribute act.
Night Patrol is on UK/ROI VOD from March 16th.
