When legacy LAPD cop Ethan Hawkins (an absolutely electric Justin Long) is promoted to an elite specialized gang-busting unit, he and his rookie partner Xavier Carr (Jermaine Fowler) are thrown into a contentious conflict whose roots go back further than either of them realize in director Ryan Prows’s sophomore feature, Night Patrol.
Back in 2017, Prows burst onto the scene with the brilliantly controlled chaotic crime thriller, Lowlife. It’s taken nearly eight years to get his next feature to the big screen – with a detour to create an entry in the beloved V/H/S series in 2021 – so there’s a lot riding on his return to the director’s chair in determining whether this filmmaker really has the goods or just got lucky. Thankfully, he seems to be on the right track as Night Patrol is a solidly entertaining horror film with plenty to say and style for days. Is it as revelatory as Lowlife? Maybe not, but what it does, it does well, even if a few shortcomings might keep it from becoming an instant classic.
From the opening moments of the film, we are thrust into a world that is clearly very deliberately constructed to present an image the seems to say the more things change, the more they stay the same. A young black couple are parked to do what young couples do when a cadre of white police descend upon them for no good reason at all. The scene quickly devolves into chaos, leaving the woman dead and the man shaken.
The man is Wazi (RJ Cyler), the brother of our rookie, Xavier, both of whom are the sons of Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux), the matriarch of not only her own brood, but also a shaman to the community at large. Ayanda is the type of woman who is not exactly thrilled that her son has chosen a career in law enforcement, and who seems to know more about their shadier activities than the general public.
This death proves to be a shot across the bow for the black community with whom Ayanda and Wazi share their low-income housing, The Courts, and we will soon understand the magnitude of the battle everyone is fighting. It’s not just one death, it’s a pattern that goes back centuries, and Ayanda is tired of being the victim.
Meanwhile, Ethan’s initiation into the titular Night Patrol reveals to him that this particular squad is so much more than just the best of the best, it is something supernatural. The patrol is led by Brooks (C.M. Punk), a hard-as-nails cop with a taste for violence. Not only that, they are vampires, and not the sexy kind, the brutal, unapologetically racist kind. Ethan is presented with a choice: join up or die, but the offer is more of a gesture than anything else and it soon becomes evident that there is no real choice and he’s turned against his will.
The last hour of the film becomes a non-stop battle between the Night Patrol and the residents of The Courts as the extermination squad is on a mission not to subjugate the projects, but to eliminate everyone living there entirely. While all of this is going on, Carr has discovered what the Patrol is and what they do, and Hawkins’s transformation isn’t going exactly as anyone had planned, complicating both of their roles in the conflict, which were not exactly clear to begin with. Ayanda and The Courts are armed to the teeth, they knew this day was coming and they are prepared to defend themselves, but it is going to get messy no matter what. The result is a third act that is absolute carnage, and no one is safe on either side.
Night Patrol is uninterested in subtlety. The messaging is clear and perhaps a bit too on the nose, but for those on its wavelength, extremely gratifying. The idea that the LAPD has been hostile to the black community never has been a secret, and here that enmity manifests in the Night Patrol literally draining the blood from The Courts as a way of exerting control over a population they see as inferior. The Courts, and Ayanda in particular, are no longer willing to be held down and certainly not interested in being wiped off the map, so they fight back with everything they’ve got, matching the patrol bullet for bullet.
Prows’s decision to have his cinematographer, Benjamin Kitchens, shoot on 16mm film serves as both an aesthetic and thematic stroke of brilliance. The grittiness of the film stock seems to place Night Patrol as happening out of time. While it is clearly a modern story, the visual element reminds us that this could easily have been a story told 30, 50, or even 100 years ago. The fact that the majority of the film takes place at night when grain of 16 mm film stock becomes even more pronounced, is a bold choice that creates an experience that begs to be viewed on the largest screen possible.
As exciting as the film’s final hour is, it does introduce a number of characters who do not get their fair due in terms of development, rather placing them directly in the line of fire as warriors at Ayanda’s behest. Most of the Night Patrol is nameless, and apart from Xavier, Wazi, and Ayanda, the situation at The Courts is equally anonymous. Do we need to know the names of every soldier in a battle? Not really, but some of these characters get significant amounts of expository dialogue and we know nothing about them.
For whatever its faults may be, Night Patrol remains a rousingly entertaining collective trauma-centered bloodbath, eschewing the tedious navel gazing that often afflicts such enterprises. In a way it is unfortunate that it is releasing in the shadow of Sinners, another vampire film that addresses almost the exact same set of concerns but on a grander scale, but on the other hand, it may be that that film’s success will drive the audience to seek similar film, in which case Night Patrol is right up their alley. A film with a concrete political and social point-of-view is a gamble these days, but for that reason Night Patrol is even more admirable for saying “fuck you if you don’t agree” and charging forward at full speed. I’ll always give film extra credit for taking big swings, and Prows pulls no punches in Night Patrol, a blunt force weapon can often do the same damage as something more surgical, and this one is like a sledgehammer to the face. I dig it.