Late Movie Review

 This is a sort of review of an HBO mini-series that I had never heard of, "The Night Of", but found when I was lacking viewing pleasure for the evening. I tried the "True Detective" series with Jodie Foster, but if she was trying to impress me, she failed. Her story took place up at the Arctic circle, but the mystery seemed to involve the occult and that doesn't appeal to me. It just doesn't and I'm not sorry about that. If solving the mystery involves an 9th century Norse God or an Egyptian curse unleashed, it shall remain a Scooby Do mystery to me. Gritty fictional- or non-fictional- crime is my wheelhouse. I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out who did it in fiction though because it's always the writer. They decide whodunnit, often with no rhyme or reason. Fucking writers like to GOTCHA! 

So, at this point, I don't know who did it, but I know who didn't, and that would be the main character, Naz (Riz Ahmed). He's an American born, Pakistani college student who one night takes his dad's taxicab (without permission) to go to a party in New York City. Unfamiliar with dad's cab, he's driving about the city with the 'on-duty' light on and people keep trying to hail him. Not cool in the city. When he stops to get his bearings, people keep getting in the backseat and barking out destinations. They get really pissed when he tries to explain he's not really a cabbie, off duty or on. I get that. (I got cussed out by a cabbie when I worked at a bar in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago, when I failed to turn off the bar's cab light after flipping it on for a customer. I was, indeed, the suburban bumpkin the entire yuppie/buppie/guppie clientele already had determined I was.) Finally, a very beautiful woman gets in. She wants to go to the beach. There is an Atlantic Ocean that washes up on NYC, but evidently, it's a long drive to it from wherever they were. Would she settle for a river? She would. 

Beautiful white women can do whatever they please in these United States. Everybody knows that. Naz knew that. He took her to the river. They talked. Her interest began to approach his level. He then took her to her fancy neighborhood, and she brought him inside her home. They drank and used drugs. They played mumbly peg. They fucked. When he comes to, he's downstairs in the kitchen of her home. He doesn't know why. He goes upstairs to her bedroom to thank her for the very interesting evening, and see's she has been stabbed to death. Blood everywhere. He panics and flees. The door locks behind him. He runs to daddy's cab and realizes he has forgotten the keys! He then breaks a window in the door to gain entry, grabs his keys, the drugs that were left, and the bloody knife. He happens to get stopped a few blocks away for a traffic violation by two cops who only suspect him of being drunk and a poor driver. While they are dealing with him for that, they get and decide to respond to a report of a break-in at the house he had just left as they are close by. They decide to bring him along as they investigate that call, as they cannot just let him go in his condition. OK. I guess I'll allow that, but would real cops do that? Back at the crime scene, he's safely locked in the squad car while they enter the brownstone and eventually discover the brutally murdered woman.

Have you figured out what is wrong with this story yet? It's really glaring...

The cops who answered the burglary call have to stay on that scene, so another cop is told to bring him back to the precinct for a blood alcohol test. For some reason the cops fail to do the test, and Naz is stuck in the station, sobering up and acting nervous for like two hours. As far as the cops are concerned, his only apparent crime- DWI- is a moot point now as it is too late to get a good read off him. They are about to let him go, but as is custom, before they set him free. they have to pat him down. Huh? Shouldn't that have been done a couple hours earlier? Yes, and anywhere else but television it would have been. So, maybe they were dotting t's and crossing i's when they decide to give him a farewell frisk. In this pat down, they find the bloody knife in his jacket. He could have tossed it in the police station during his time there, uncuffed and roaming free. But he didn't. People do strange things all the time, right?

OK. Here's what's wrong with the story. If you were to stab a person 22 times, there would be blood all over YOU!  Not a single cop or lawyer noticed this throughout the entire series. It strikes me as a good defense point. I kept waiting for that to come up, but it never did. There's no getting around the mess that a stabbing makes (blood all over the wall by the bed, etc.) but no one thought it odd that the suspect was so clean. Not even a mention of, "Well, he was naked as they had just made love, so he showered and then put his clothes on..." Even I as the viewer- who was 99.9% sure he did not do it, would have accepted that scenario if they had bothered to go even that far. 

If it sounds like I'm pooping on this movie, I'm not really. In every Siskel & Ebert review you've ever seen, they would rave about a film and then spend the rest of the segment telling us everything that was wrong with it before giving it two thumbs up. That's how reviews go. I'm just keeping the tradition alive. 

I actually enjoyed it a lot. John Turturro was his excellent self as the ambulance-chasing lawyer who initially defends Naz, after seeing him in the police station. His forte was getting plea deals for folks arrested on drug or prostitution charges. He was overmatched, but there seemed to be a once promising lawyer inside him. James Gandolfini was originally supposed to play that role, but he suddenly died after filming began. Turturro rocked it though, and I couldn't see Gandolfini or (reportedly) Robert DeNiro doing the role. In movies it is often the singer, not the song. This was a film about broken people in a broken system. Great performances by all. Naz being Muslim and the crime being post 9/11, there was a very good subplot about his Pakistani family and how they were affected by his arrest and the ensuing travails through the American judicial system. For much of the film, Naz is locked up in Riker's Island, and he goes from being a nice, first-generation American boy, to an ever-hardening convict. One can definitely see how brutal prison conditions would change any man. Naz is given protection by a powerful con (the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams) but there is always a price to pay for such benevolence. He helps to smuggle drugs into the prison and succumbs to smoking cocaine himself because, why not. His life as he knew it was over. His best offer was copping a plea for 15 years. Innocent people do that in real life. But he maintained his innocence and rolled the dice on a trial. 

I'm not going to ruin the ending. You'll have to watch it to find out that Jody Foster- with the help of an 8th century Aztec warrior princess- rescued him and they all became a throple for eternity, feasting on the souls of the damned. Or maybe they didn't. Fucking writers- you never know!