Supremacy (2014)

I watched it because I thought a review suggested that it was "ripped from the headlines" its not. Garett Tully has never existed in real life! I googled the name, and the circumstances of the plot. Ironically, the closest thing I could find is quite opposite, and that was a recent Chicago kidnapping and torture of a mentally challenged white teenager by four African American young adults led by Brittany Herring, who were emboldened by anti Trump sentiment, and who attended many BLM meetings. So I guess it has some similarity to the plot of this film. Perhaps this movie is a race reversed version of that. More likely, its just a typical, boring, contrived, pandering story that is as predictable as it is stupid. Not "ripped from the headlines" at all. Unless its the made up headlines we see so often today. Teaches me to read a few lines of a review and base my decisions to watch on that. Don't make my mistake. Don't watch this film.

This is One of Those Low-Budget Movies that is Confined, Mostly, to a Couple of Small Rooms and the Director has the Characters Cry, Sob, and Bawl A Lot to Add Some Movement and Emotion to the Restrained Sets.This is Basically All Over Emoted with Much Shouting, Except for Danny Glover Who Whispers and Mumbles for Contrast. The Conflict Between the Neo-Nazi Couple and the African-American "Family" Consists of Guns to the Face, and Waterworks.Nothing Much Happens and a Few Flashbacks Relieve the Claustrophobic Atmosphere Once in Awhile and that Helps, but Ultimately the Film Goes Nowhere and Strains for Some Insight that is Rarely Attained. Joe Anderson Does OK but the Constant Gun Barrell He Thrusts in the Faces of the Hostages Gets Boring and Redundantly Silly After a While. Dawn Oliveri as the White Supremacy "Groupie" as She is Described Waivers Wildly and Fluctuates Between Psychotic and Motherly. None of this is Satisfying Trying to Deliver Messages About the Psychology of Hate Groups or the Bonding of Family in a Crisis that it Tries So Desperately to Convey. It is Done in an Overwrought Fashion and the Script is None too Smart About Any of It.

Based on actual events (so a bit of licence has deffo been taken) this is about Garrett Tully (Joe Anderson) who has just done a fifteen year stretch for armed robbery. He is the sort of guy who has a modicum of intelligence all designed to back up his racist philosophy and more tattoos than a Colombian drugs cartel. He is also one of the White Supremacists and the brotherhood or what ever they want to call themselves, arrange for some cheap trailer park trash to pick him up on his release. This is Doreen played very convincingly by Dawn Olivieri ('American Hustle').Then things go South very quickly when Tully guns down a cop. They then high tail it to a local house where an extended African American family live and they take them hostage.Danny Glover plays the man of the hostage house here and he does so with a gravitas and vulnerability that actually raises this film up a level or two. It is an indie effort but does not suffer from that. Some of the police procedures are a bit questionable, but as ever are done for dramatic effect rather than accuracy. It has an air of menace and panic and for all its minor flaws remains a strong film with some very credit worthy performances and the direction is to be commended too. Not action packed either; much more psychological so if that is your thing then this will be one you may want to watch.

I think the most important thing is to first off, commend Joe Anderson - an actor who deserves far more recognition than he has been given in his long standing career; Tully is the film's inordinate saving grace, and it is not thanks to any brilliant script writing or cinematography, he brought both vulnerability and unexpected humanity to a character that would otherwise have fallen flatly into the 'bad ex-con' category.Tully, in the final scene, and in momentary glimpses throughout the film, provides the film with its emotional strength; you cannot look away from him - Anderson is pure pent-up energy, raw emotion.Regrettably, the film does not take his character as far as it needed to - Supremacy is a thing of enormous potential, it could be extraordinary. But, it is not. Tully, in the end, only has a brief moment of redemptive vulnerability, the moments in between are not enough. There was potential within the frame of the script to accelerate further, to shake the moral boundaries - I was hoping not to see another 'and then the bad guys get punished, the end' - I wanted this film to make me question what makes a person bad, if that exists at all, I wanted to feel more for Tully.That's not to say that Joe Anderson is not sympathetic in the role. But I'm uncertain how much of that was his strength as an actor, versus the filmmaker's intention - I'm guessing that it's pretty much all on Joe.The ending ought to have been left, at the very least, ambiguous. For a character to alter, and then be given the death penalty regardless - off screen, as a footnote - erases the work of the actor and the filmmaker; in the end, he is punished, karma/the law happens etc. Yes, it's based on a true story, but it's still a narrative film - that's no excuse. The ending diminishes Anderson's strikingly childlike performance in the last scene - he takes the thunder from Glover altogether, we care about Tully (or would, if the character arc had been more pronounced), ending it on a footnote is lazy script writing.To conclude, I did enjoy the film, it was well made, there were moments when the cinematography was lovely to look at. I wish that they had hired another writer, however, because the potential of the film was probably greater than the film itself.