The influence of Steven Soderbergh’s award-winning film, Traffic, released nearly a decade ago is present in John Swab‘s King Ivory too. King Ivory features narcs, cartel, gangster and even junkies–how good could it be Soderbergh must be wondering to himself. Well that is not all bad now is it.
It is such a surprise to have audiences witness the same trends with the opioid epidemic as they did twenty years ago when crack was gripping America. Two decades have passed since King Ivory was made, but his attempts to stay relevant to today’s societal issues were a major hit. While King Ivory is ineffective as drama or poetry, it has several gruesome action sequences and strong-witted characters making it hard to look away. Sure, its portrayal of America and the hold fentanyl has never been favorable to the audience, but in reality, it did deserve a wider appearance.
Directing genre films like Ida Red and Candy Land, Swab published five more since 2019. Long Gone Heroes, his upcoming action film with a $20 million budget, is set to hit theaters shortly. There’s also a gritty quality to the stories he tells: his previous film, Candy Land, the title of which harkens back to the board game, offered a glimpse into the lives of so-called “lot lizards”, sex workers who service truckers at rest areas across the United States. Here, his distinct style is applied to a more authentic depiction of the toll that fentanyl abuse takes on the city of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
This is a story about drugs and crime told through the eyes of someone whose name comes from one of the street names for heroin. Consequently, all the energy from the word “Go” can be felt all the way until the final shot is fired. The movement and texture of the camera work by Will Stone and the aggressive pace of the film by its editor Andrew Aaronson make it ever so slightly chaotic during the beginning of the film. Eventually, however, the viewer starts understanding the complex web of conflicts that involve an opioid that is ecstatically addictive and very easy to produce, transport and operate.
“Swab surely knows his way around the drug.” In an astonishingly candid admission, director Farren Blackburn confessed during a recent interview that he shot fentanyl in 2015, when he was still an addict. While this director has been clean for the past 9 years, it definitely didn’t make filming the scenes depicting such real-life struggles of dependence and getting high, any more difficult for him.
One of these freebasing sequences shows a hunky high school student, Jack (Jasper Jones) who becomes addicted to fentanyl because of his girlfriend Colby (Kaylee Curry). But as it turns out, Jack’s dad Layne (James Badge Dale), happens to be a narcotics officer battling it out daily to get the drug off the streets. He has a partner, Ty (George Carroll). Both are bare-knuckled fighters who employ tactics more reminiscent of United States Marines than cops. This was all made evident in the opening shootout where bullets went flying around.
But there’s a war out there for Tulsa’s intoxicating drug business not run by traditional cartels but by a head of a native tribe (Graham Greene) who runs the Indian Brotherhood from behind bars. He is not only a convict but a convict working with Smiley (Ben Foster) on some assassination jobs before he is let out of jail. Upon leaving, Smiley is picked up by his uncle, played by British actor Ritchie Costar who delivers in a bizarre rendition of an Irish redneck, to help the tribe eliminate some competition from the locals.
The cast of characters and the various plot-points are introduced rather rapidly so much that they can get confusing, and it takes a lot of time to understand beyond the petty intrigues, who exactly works for whom and why. But the brutal and dynamic filmmaking style of Swab, along with his intention to show a failed and repulsive modern Tulsa, compensate drawbacks of some seams of the narrative that are overly elastic.
Swab then presents a case from the Mexican perspective, where drugs like fentanyl are produced at a lower price and are smuggled by the drug cartels into the United States. The key players there are Ramon Gázra (Michael Mando, quite memorable as a narco in Better Call Saul) and a young Lago (David De La Barcena) who has been smuggled across the border as a dealer, making delivery of drugs to those in need of them, like matrimony by giving food and not a marriage ceremony.
Swab produces variety of scenes and narratively astounding real life events that are so extensive that it begins to encompass details from the BPCR’s sprawl and scope which at times felt unwieldy. In some cases, it appears that the words were taken from real life events, in other cases, they create a movie atmosphere, where only dialogue is used more as genre bondage. The acting was not always all there, but what stands out is the distinct, but disturbing placed walls that can hardly be ignored. Foster kills it, when she has been given the role of a killer that does not have any feelings and only communicates through a tube placed in a hole within her throat. Even Leo who plays Smiley’s insane mother manages to be both funny and serious at the same time, especially in the moment she has to perform illegal operations on Ramon.
What is even more notable is the few set-pieces that follow the character development of Layne and his quest for taking down the bad guys alongside with the other cops. One of them is set in a supermarket with numerous shoppers and bright fluorescents hanging from the ceiling, which do offer better insight into the brutality of what takes place in the end. Another one takes place just before the movie’s ending, involving a gunfight that takes place in a motel, which is so chaotic and bloody it could easily be a cut from a movie based on the Iraq War.
One wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that it is an outright bombastic ending, and in the final analysis of King Ivory not quite everything appears to be real. However, what lifts Swab’s latest out of the space where every other drug thriller drifts to, is how he strives to make every single scene come out as if drawn from lived experiences. The picture that he draws of the currently unbridled fentanyl plague via the middle of the country is indeed very ugly, which clearly was the aim of the director. Even the one or two instances in the film, which are the only instances of hope and do not come until the very end, can only be described as absolute mirages in an ocean of drugs and American decay.
For more movies visit like King Ivory on 123Movies.