Asphalt City 2024 Movie Review Trailer eview

 In “Asphalt City,” a movie that keeps working to get high on its own intensity, Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan play paramedics who spend their nights driving through hell (I mean, Brooklyn). There are countless shots of the two in their EMS van, traveling under subway tracks, the same kind of dirty Brooklyn boulevard that Popeye Doyle traversed in the famous “French Connection” subway-car chase. 

As Ruth (Penn) and Cross (Sheridan) patrol the Brownsville neighborhood, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden areas of New York City, those elevated tracks become part of the film's meticulously oppressive visual design. 

Director: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Writers: Ben Mac Brown, Shannon Burke, Ryan King
Stars: Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Gbenga Akinnagbe

The two have so little room to breathe that they can barely see the sky. After a while, though, you start to think: Do these guys never drive on a side street? Like everything else in “Asphalt City” (retitled “Black Flies” since its Cannes premiere), those subway tracks are elegant symbols of doom that are too direct.

The very idea of a parademic thriller sounds, at least on paper, like a recipe for a riveting drama. The two partners are sort of police officers, jumping from one trauma to the next. At any moment, a rescue situation could be life or death. And the demands of the job are such that high stress becomes the very driving force behind the film's momentum.

In 1999, when Martin Scorsese reteamed with screenwriter Paul Schrader to make "Bringing Out the Dead," with Nicolas Cage as his ambulance tour guide through the existential apocalypse, that was certainly the kind of thing they were going for. But the film turned out to be an overly calculated and undercooked retread of “Taxi Driver.” Far superior was “Broken Vessels,” a low-budget indie version of the same premise that came out just a few months before “Bringing Out the Dead.” It starred Jason London as the EMS rookie and Todd Field (yes, the director of “Tár,” when he was still an actor, and a very good one) as the jaded, heroin-smoking triage veteran who administers medical care with the Efficiency of a professional killer.

Few saw or remember "Broken Vessels" and "Bringing Out the Dead" is not a Scorsese film that even many Nicolas Cage fans have returned to, but "Asphalt City" draws heavily on both films. Penn plays a kind of archetypal fusion of Cage and Field's characters: a man who knows all the angles and shortcuts of protocol, and wants to save people, but who is also something of a clandestine thrill junkie, one who has seen so much misery and death that he hardly knows if he is a lifesaver or a gravedigger. Penn is an old pro when it comes to a role like this. He plays Rut (short for Rutkovsky) with gaunt features and thin, mean manners, plus a thousand-yard stare that has burned into every reverie; Ruth can no longer see the light at the end of the tunnel. With an ex-wife who is about to move his young daughter upstate, he is a man whose life has become horrible.

Cross, on the other hand, is working on getting into medical school (which is why he lives in a mousetrap in Chinatown), and Tye Sheridan plays him as a fresh-faced idealist who, of course, is going to have his illusions shot down. . Sheridan gives a calm, uncomplicated performance, though as he tries to keep up with the stoic moodiness of the Penn Method, I never wished more that Sheridan didn't seem like an amalgamation of young Brando, young Paul Newman, and Norman Mailer. Those associations just make it that much more evident that not much is going on behind his eyes.

“Asphalt City” begins with Ruth and Cross arriving at the scene of a shooting, while the victims drip blood from various wounds. That sets the stakes for the film, which won't be about the brave saving of heart attack victims; It will try to rub the public's nose in the violence and misery of the city center. Thugs, drug dealers and skinheads with tattooed heads, a vicious dog, a domestic abuser who won't let them treat his partner who is sitting there with her eye swollen shut: the film is a nihilistic carnival of social breakdown that floats by. freely. It is like descending, circle by circle, into the purgatory of Dostoevskian pain.

However, after a while, you begin to notice that “Asphalt City,” staged with maximum sensationalism in hand by French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, has no plot at all. None! It's just one harrowing scene after another. That, in a way, is why Sauvaire has to keep escalating the action, until he finally arrives at splattered brains and a mangled fetus.

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