With an opening statement like, ‘The Bible tells us to rejoice in our suffering’, it’s normal to expect a story with depth and nuance. It expected a lot more than “Boneyard.” But a shoddy and ghastly portrayal of the ‘west mesa murders’ aka a notorious real life crime case that has still not been solved and happened a few years in earlier this 21st century. A crime that has been dramatized into a motion picture but cruder in nature than it should have been and what even made the film quite ironic is that “Sound of Freedom” seems to be a prestigious piece of art in comparison to this.
As is often the case in some motion pictures, this one too is “based on a real story”. Its embarrassing and Baltimore procedural about the strife of many law enforcement agents, as well as the occasional suspense suspense which is similar to what was seen in the movie “MaXXXine”, made Robert Akbar’s film a mixture of madness. Four screenwriters have written it and their combined knowledge is, well, scattered, among four narrative designs that come and tell the same story at different times rather than have a single dramatic and interesting spin around it. What’s worse is that Gibson’s character in it seemed to me a lot more myopic that one can only envision. While (many parts of) it was decidedly too chaotic to be boring, it was only a little less chaotic to bother becoming entertaining. Unsurprisingly, I do not believe it will reach the levels of success that ‘Sound of Freedom’ achieved. It will be available on demand on July 2nd. It will be released in a few cinemas on the 5th.
In a suburban area of Albuquerque, within an arroyo, the remains of eleven suspected women were uncovered by a woman in 2009 who was out for a jog with her canine companion. Identifiers of the remains indicate that the deceased were primarily Hispanic sex workers who had been murdered around four to eight years ago. As the police managed to speak with a few suspects, charges were never brought against them and they never were definitively linked to the case, although it is important to note that the killings anyway seem to have stopped after one of the men was killed in 2006.
Here, a similar discovery causes police chief Carter (Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson) to make the logical decision to task partnered homicide detectives Young (Nora Zehetner) and Ortega (Brian Van Holt) with following the basic investigation of the case. But they’re also joined by external assistance in the shape of Agent Petrovick, another of Gibson’s long line of drunken hag types who are relentlessly terrible and utterly give more of a bloodhound instinct than everyone combined. He indicates that the killer, who has managed to elude capture, is most probably a 30 something Hispanic male, a ‘grim mission oriented killer,’ who reasons, ‘He is trying to make the world a better place by eliminating all the people who make him sin.’
This profile fits perfectly upper crust loser Caesar (Weston Cage Coppola) who is overweight, glasses wearing, who we see peeking stalking girls from far off including sex workers. But then also suspicion falls on Officer Tate (Michael Sirow), a tough irregular who is commonly referred to as “the sleaziest cop on the beat,” known to have had dubious exchanges with almost all of the deceased victims of extending the hawk of drug cartel and human trafficking prostitutes on his territory.
Represented mostly on the narrative border though Petrovick is likely to take the more philosophical perspectives in voicing over to the viewer some thick accent and hard boiled ideas of many great Russian writers. He attempts to erase the division by arguing: “this case was personal.” Years ago he had a daughter who was shot and killed during a drive by. But then this is exactly the kind of cliché ridden business in which “personal” becomes the defining attribute of every conceivable individual, for almost every one of the principal characters has an artificial tragic additional spine. The script is a collage of episodes, subplots, flashbacks and digressions that looks like they have been torn out of time but don’t define the main action’s frame. It looks like a more ‘excitement is the thing’ strategy where every character who was given decent coverage gets some expected big theatricals crying or other kinds of violence although the character’s function was brief and the character delivered almost nothing else.
Highly prolific Akbar actor writer and producer who in the last few years has garnered a dozen of under the radar films does not seem to have the skills required in managing actors. The cast has therefore been left to do what they think. It has worked out in different ways.
Gibson and others like cowriter producer Vincent E. McDaniel (in the role of Tate’s narcotics superior) have some bits of their dignity intact while many others are in the muck. The teaming of Zehetner and Van Holt is never effective due to uninteresting writing while the villains are permitted to chew the scenery a little too much. A few of the participants look completely and utterly futile of which Jackson is probably the most visible and puzzling since he has done way too much screen work over the past 20 years since “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” to be able to justify such a stiff performance.
Even if we can give an excuse to viewers for propping this film due to the exploits of cinematographer Joshua Reis and editor R.J. Cooper, ‘Boneyard’ does not build any degree of force, suspense or environment it feels like watching just any television series sequence with the shaky overused camera action to recreate moments of supposed intensity. And worst still, unintentionally portentous beats of Andrew Morgan Smith’s original score further accentuate the shortcomings.
There’s no doubt that the lack of so many murder scenes is a good thing and this is because Akbar mainly transitions from women getting into cars to the assassin’s shovel used in creating graves. Quite paradoxically, although the actresses representing prostitutes or other types of prey here manage to evoke some sympathy for their characters, the film does not have sufficient death knell to evoke the plausibility in the audience. The film ends by saying “the film is dedicated to the victims of the West Mesa Murders,” but it also leaves the impression that these poor girls have been presented, in a rather coarse way, oh what a B movie again that uses them in a cruel sense and even does not make the diversion for them to be coy.
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