Rob Peace (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Breaking Bad Goes to Yale. Or Good Guy Does Bad In Order To Do Good. Can’t say the current title is any more inviting than those – I guess this character isn’t at all known outside the U.S. where a book was written about him (it’s “based” on a true story, we are told) – but at least gives more of an idea of the level of complication we’re dealing with. The film lacks the sharp ironic intelligence required to make such a complex tale work and direction is so shapeless, diffuse, at times that it’s hard to keep going. And it falls prey to the Martin Scorsese trope of the voice-over telling us more about what’s going on in a character’s mind than his interplay with other characters. Yet, this is an interesting story and you wish it had been better told.

On the one hand any time the eponymous character gets into a financial snit he just falls back on drug dealing. On the other, though you could argue his father is a victim of blatant racism, Rob (Jay Will) never plays this particular card. We are constantly told he has a special gift for bringing people together, but the only evidence of that is when weed is on the table and in his entrepreneurial dealings which revolve around making a fortune from refurbishing empty homes in the neighborhood.

Blame the structure for the fact it appears to bounce around all over the place. A few neatly-placed flashbacks would have solved the problem, focused on present, rather than taking us on a near 20-year stretch mapping out an entire life. Rob, mathematical whizzkid, growing up in a tough locale, gets sent to private school for black kids run by a white priest, courtesy of single mom (Mary J. Blige) working three jobs, and manages to get some sort of scholarship to Yale where he’s got the kind of brain apparently capable of the radical thinking scientific breakthroughs require. Unfortunately, the only breakthrough he makes is of the Breaking Bad kind, setting up a lab on the premises, selling a better class of dope to his classmates.  

When his dope-dealing father Skeet (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who also directs) is jailed for murder, Rob – who, by the way, has changed his name so no one will make the connection with the jailbird – takes up his case, through a loophole gaining his father a few weeks of freedom. Then he turns to dope-dealing to fund a lawyer to argue his father’s case and also to fund the experimental drugs required to keep his old man alive when he succumbs to brain cancer.

Put front and center those two elements would have been enough for  a very sharp drama, especially as Rob begins to doubt his father’s innocence after discovering he was physically abusive to his mother. The best scene in the movie, spoiled by some over-acting by Ejiofor, is when the dying father realizes his son has these doubts.

There’s an awful grey area at the heart of the movie. You’d have thought someone of Rob’s intelligence could have dug up the court records and presented  more evidence pointing towards his father’s innocence and that he’s been the victim of a fit-up and it kind of skates over the supposed racist element here but common sense tells you it’s not going to be a white guy that’s infiltrated somehow this black enclave and shot dead two black women.

Towards the end of the picture one of his buddies points out that it’s not the duty of the son to look after the wayward father, and that aspect, the almost saintly aspect, isn’t dealt with much either.

A lot of scenes could be cut. One sequence of him playing water polo would be enough, one of him mooching around smoking dope, one of carving the turkey etc. Nobody appears honest enough. His mom doesn’t tell him her husband was a violent man or ask why the son is wasting his life, risking his future, for the man who after all abandoned him. And just exactly why is never gone in to. Rob himself doesn’t question his own ethics, returning to the life he is presumably trying to escape in order to fund the lawyer and the doctors suggests a lack of self-awareness. There’s none of the chutzpah that made American Gangster (2007) so riveting. You can see a life being thrown away through self-justified crime. He goes back to the drug-dealing when his real estate company goes bust during the sub-prime mortgage scandal, incurs the wrath of the full-time drug-dealers who fear he’s invading their turf and kill him.

I’m not sure how you deal with ambiguity in a movie but one way is not to ignore it.  

On a poor day for moviegoing, on a double double bill, this was the second best picture I saw all day, way behind a return to the sumptuous Count of Monte Cristo, but way ahead of the buffoonish mess of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the nonsense of Afraid.

Could sure do with a remake so an interesting tale could be more sharply told.