Asphalt City

Asphalt City

You might recall a scene in the cult classic “Repo Man” when Emilio Estevez says, “This is intense,” during a high-speed auto repossession and Harry Dean Stanton coolly replies, “Repo man’s always intense.” That pretty much sums up being a big city paramedic you don’t need the movies to tell you how it is.

Adapting Shannon Burke’s 2008 novel “Black Flies,” Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown’s script for “Asphalt City,” directed by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, begins in the middle of a very bad outer-boroughs NYC emergency medical intervention: New to the department Ollie (a fresh-faced but still beleaguered looking Tye Sheridan) tries to treat a gunshot victim after a housing project shootout. Screenwriters King and Brown have not exactly killed themselves to come up with different sounding dialogue; “I’m trying to do my f–king job here,” “f–king rookie” and even “I’m getting too old for this s**t” are heard on the busy, multi-channel soundtrack.

Director Sauvaire tends to gravitate toward extreme life situations, and his style of sound and vision overload served him reasonably well in 2018 boxing in a Thai prison punchfest “A Prayer Before Dawn.” That film had an unusual story that kept it buoyant in an unusually plotless narrative structure; the story here is more familiar.

You know what it is. You become a big-city paramedic because you want to help people. But the people themselves are such. Not into self-care, living (more often than not) in filth, not speaking your language hell, they don’t even say thank you after you save their lives! Some weeks. Ollie doesn’t help his own existential outlook by rooming with a couple of ancients down Chinatown way, so he can save money for med school; nor is his life improved by his relationship with single mother cum fellatrix with whom he doesn’t communicate effectively.

The first half hour of emergency sequences in this movie may, and I’m not sure about this but still, give a certain message to any racist white male urbanite who’s watching it. Namely, that every ethnic group he fears is one he should fear. Kids with guns who are all hopped up on something! Tattooed Hispanic guys with their shirts off, playing around with pit bulls (the mean kind, not the ones they say are good for kids)! Junkie women who might be Filipino cursing like sailors in the back of an ambulance for 10 minutes straight! It really IS a jungle out there! Goodness gracious!

If Ollie (Sheridan) can barely keep his head above water, his good shift partner Rutovsky the older grizzled Rutovsky; call him Rut has got things figured out pretty well by comparison. Played by Sean Penn with some welcome underplaying of the embittered-cop cliché, Rut isn’t a cynic through and through. He knows the moves; he’s got a healthy sense of pragmatism that takes him into very dark moral waters as the film progresses.

(Rut’s estranged partner is played by Katherine Waterson, whose Expression of Disapproval identifies her as a genuine chip off the old block, i.e., her father Sam.) Bad shift partner Lafontaine is played by beefed-up puffy-faced Michael Pitt, coming on like he wants to be in “Boondock Saints 3”; his lines are all terrible: “I don’t know if I believe in Heaven but I believe in Hell,” hoo boy, and then “I ain’t Jesus, I’ll tell you that.” On the other hand Mike Tyson plays Ollie’s gruff station chief so authentically that one almost doesn’t have time to think “stunt casting” before thinking better.

Oddly enough perhaps it’s when the film is most quiet that it’s most effective. A sour scene in which Ollie and Rut go to a nursing home and find a patient with his lungs filling with liquid, knowing that they’re taking him to the hospital only for him to bounce straight back to this place, realizing that here they’re just going through the motions, is devastating.

So too is a scene in which Penn and Sheridan morbidly shoot the breeze while walking through an empty snowy Coney Island. But then you’ve got black flies swarming in an apartment where there’s a body (the movie was called after the book for a reason) or blood-gouts aplenty when we visit a young mother who’s just given birth; it makes “Immaculata’s” finale look tasteful. Sometimes maximum intensity doesn’t yield optimal results.

Watch Asphalt City For Free On Gomovies.