![]() ![]() It’s also not the only strong work in this massive ensemble cast. It’s a high-voltage, Emmy-worthy performance. “Can’t fuck with Superman,” he confidently tells a colleague mere moments before he’s taken into custody. ![]() His cockiness is what draws his direct reports to him it’s also his downfall. Speaking with boastful, rounded o’s and walking with a sway that suggests he’s ready to spring into attack mode at any time, you can’t take your eyes off the guy even when his behavior is so abhorrent you want to. An actor with an impressively elastic range, Bernthal infuses Jenkins with distinctly Baltimorean swagger. Nevertheless, it’s a vivid, richly detailed series, shot with gritty intimacy by director Reinaldo Marcus Green ( King Richard) and worth watching for a host of reasons. There are moments when the show seems more interested in making a case than telling a full-fledged story, and the timeline-jumping can get confusing despite the text from incident reports used as transitions and designed to to keep us grounded in the chronology of events. Because of that structure, We Own This City is an extremely procedural procedural. Ultimately, we learn what we know about Jenkins and his unscrupulous colleagues through evidence uncovered by Nicole, police from neighboring counties, and the feds. (Dagmara Domińczyk of Succession plays the lead fed.)īefore the GTTF probe heats up, Nicole Steele (Wunmi Mosaku), an attorney for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, is conducting her own inquiry into police practices in the city. His misconduct - which ranges from physically assaulting suspects to planting drugs on innocent citizens to skimming significant amounts of cash from money discovered during weapons busts - is disturbing and runs deep, prompting police in the Harford and Baltimore Counties to begin investigating what eventually becomes a case for the FBI. There are few, if any, Bunk Morelands or Lester Freamons in this Baltimore.Īt the center of We Own This City is Sergeant Wayne Jenkins (Jon Bernthal), whose rise from rookie officer to amoral head of the Gun Trace Task Force is tracked via flashbacks to past incidents. We Own This City isn’t a sequel to The Wire, but it certainly feels like a complement, one that quickly encourages us to be suspicious of every cop we encounter rather than warm to them despite their flaws. That’s reflective of actual events in post–Freddie Gray Baltimore as well as the evolution in public consideration of policing during the Black Lives Matter movement. While the previous series showed us both good police officers and ones who did not always act in the best interests of the public, the new show is explicitly an indictment of policing gone all the way off the rails. That said, We Own This City differs from The Wire in both intention and execution. These casting choices underline certain realities conveyed elsewhere in the series: Guys who look like Williams or Lombardozzi will always hold positions of power, and the line separating cop behavior from criminal behavior has dissolved almost entirely. Several of the actors who once played drug dealers - Jamie Hector, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Tray Chaney, and Jermaine Crawford, among others - are now portraying cops, while Delaney Williams (Sergeant Jay Landsman in The Wire) takes on the role of actual onetime Baltimore police commissioner Kevin Davis, and Domenick Lombardozzi (formerly Herc, a sergeant in the Major Crimes Division) is the head of the police union. Numerous actors from that seminal drama, which aired from 2002 to 2008, appear in roles that feel extra meaningful in light of the parts they carried before. Given its interest in Baltimore policing, there are multiple scenes - of cops and feds listening in on wiretaps or interrogations of potential suspects and sources - that feel reminiscent of moments from The Wire. The six episodes were adapted for the screen by The Wire creator David Simon and author George Pelecanos, who also worked on the previous Baltimore-set HBO drama, as did several of We Own This City’s other executive producers: Nina K. That said, it is impossible to watch We Own This City without thinking of The Wire. Based on the nonfiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton about the Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force, it is its own compelling story in limited-series form. We Own This City is not a sequel to The Wire. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |