White Boy Rick Review

I'm slowly getting caught up on my September movie reviews. While August was a bit sparse in terms of quality, causing me to skip a lot of the in the second half of the month, September has at least provided a lot of interested titles that had my attention, even though the month hasn't exactly lit up the box office office after "The Nun" exploded with a $50 million debut. But I'm still working on this second weekend of September in terms of getting my reviews up. On said second weekend, "The Predator" won the weekend in terms of the numbers, but it certainly wasn't a win for the franchise as the movie set the record for the worst debut ever for a movie debuting in over 4,000 theaters, coming in a pathetic $24.6 million. I've never seen a Predator movie and I'm certainly not starting with that one, so don't expect a review from me. However, it's the other three movies that had my attention that weekend. I already gave you my review of "Unbroken: Path to Redemption" and now it's time to give you my reviews of "White Boy Rick" and "A Simple Favor." Then we can move on to this past weekend where we got the family friendly Halloween film "The House with a Clock in Its Walls" from director Eli Roth. First up in all of that is our yearly drug trafficking movie, "White Boy Rick."

This movie is based on a true story that happened in the 80's. Because, you know, we're a bit obsessed with the 80's right now and Hollywood likes these drug trafficking movies. So to continue both of these trends, someone dug up this story of Richard Wershe Jr., aka White Boy Rick, a young boy in Detroit who was caught up in the drug business at an all too early age. While perhaps not a drug kingpin like some of the trailers claim, even though the movie itself doesn't really do so, Rick was heavily involved in the drug business by the time he turned 17. I would say a big portion of the credit for this goes to a poor upbringing with divorced parents, who weren't exactly model citizens themselves, combined with being caught up in the wrong crowd. Living in Detroit certainly doesn't help matters there as the crime in the city over the years, and even today, is very well documented. So being "caught in the wrong crowd" wasn't a very hard thing to do. His sister got involved with a sketchy dude, which got him to be involved with sketchy friends. Pretty soon he knew his way around things fairly well in terms of petty crime and the drug business, which got him addicted to this lifestyle of drugs, money, girls and what not, which we all know never ends well.

The movie itself chronicles his story, which spans from 1983 or 1984 up until 1987, so we have a good chunk of about four or five years that they attempt to cover in just one movie, which is a bit of a daunting task. The other major element of his life that the movie focuses on, outside being involved in the drug business at an early age, is the fact that he became an FBI informant early on in the story, which was 100 percent illegal on their part. So yeah, sketchy police doing sketchy things to try to catch the sketchy criminals leads to all sorts of messy situations that poor Rick got caught in the middle of. And their using Rick as an illegal, underage FBI informant to try to catch all of his friends may or may not have planted ideas in his head of actually becoming a drug dealer. According to the movie, they recruited him to do minor drug deals so that he could tell them who was involved and where they were located. Later in the movie, in an effort to try to help out his family situation, he branches off on his own into the drug business because this thing called money is super attractive to him, and up to this point in his life, money is not a thing that him, his sister or his dad ever really had, thus we begin the downward spiral.

As far as the movie itself goes, I will give the movie all the credit for introducing me to this story. It's one of those movies where you immediately head over to the internet and Google the true story of White Boy Rick. Sometimes this causes the movie to be ruined in retrospect if you learn that the movie was inaccurate in telling this story. In certain instances, I can let that slide. But for the most part I think that if you are going to tell a true story via film, then your main objective should be to accurately tell that story. If that story doesn't lend itself to a Hollywood film, then find a different story that does and tell that one instead. If you can't find a true story that tells things the way you want it to be told, just come up with a fictional story to tell. I mean, people can watch things like "Breaking Bad" and be equally as affected by the themes of the series even though the characters and story itself are fictional. All that said, you may think that I'm leading you to believe I'm going to claim that "White Boy Rick" screws this up, but that's not the case. From what I can gather, "White Boy Rick" does a great job in accurately telling this story. Thus I commend the film for finding a fascinating story and telling it without twisting the facts of what really happened.

However, accurately telling a true story is not the only factor in making a good film based on a true story. That daunting task of covering a large time span is another major element that you need to get right and sadly "White Boy Rick" rather embarrassingly falls flat on its face when it comes to that. There's a lot of time to cover in this movie, but there's no sense of urgency in the pacing or the editing. The movie is filled with a lot of long, drawn out scenes that feel less important to the plot of the movie. In between all of those sequences are all of the more important scenes that are jumped over too quickly. Had the movie been paced properly, there would be potential for it to be similar to last year's "American Made," the drug movie with Tom Cruise, or perhaps a "Sicario." Maybe we can even look at the small screen to something like the aforementioned "Breaking Bad," which is an excellent series, or "Ozark," which I've just started, but is so far really good. In these movies or shows, the pacing properly allows for a story that leaves you on the edge of your seat given the subject matter at hand. But with "White Boy Rick," I found myself begging for the movie to get to the point. Then when it did, it ran right past the point, then slowed down again at the wrong spot.

The other major problem here is to get me to properly care about these characters and their situation. I think the movie's goal was to make you care for this kid who got stuck in an awful situation that he was unable to dig himself out of. The movie painted him as the victim of all of this. A victim of circumstance. A victim of a bad neighborhood. A victim of a poor upbringing. A victim of corrupt FBI agents who illegally used him as an underage informant and sparked the idea in his head to get into the drug industry. Yet I didn't really feel that bad for him. In any drug movie like this, being invested in the main character is essential to the enjoyment of the film, even if you disagree with the choices being made by said character. But I didn't really find myself super invested in Rick or his dad. There's nothing wrong with the acting in the movie. In fact, everyone does a great job in the roles they are given. I just don't know if the roles themselves were that interesting. Rick's dad just seemed like a guy who had an inability of getting his life together and Rick just seemed like a punk kid with no sense of moral direction who became obsessed with drugs and money. I think I was more invested in his sister's arc than his.

Even so, there was still potential with this film. The inherent problem with doing a movie like this is that there's only so many ways a story like this ends. Either the person somehow gets out and gets clean or they get thrown in prison or wind up dead. And very rarely do stories like this end up as the first option. Movies about people getting involved with the drug industry usually end up with them dead or in prison. So in telling a story like this, there's an added challenge of coming with something fresh and unique otherwise you just get another story of someone who ruined their lives doing drugs or selling drugs. But with proper execution, you can still manage to make an intense film that leaves you on the edge of your seat. "White Boy Rick" had an interesting enough story with the angle of this being a young kid who got involved in drugs, but it ended up being mostly a miss for me because the execution of the film felt like all of the emphasis was in all of the wrong places, leaving me mostly bored throughout instead of intensely invested. I'll give the movie credit for getting me interested in the real story, but the more I think about it, the more I lean towards the idea of this not being a story worthy of being invested in. So I'll give "White Boy Rick" a 6/10.