Review: ‘Snitch’

This poster promises truck carnage. The movie delivers.

Welcome to the year of Dwayne “The Rock (copyright World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc)” Johnson, a year with four different movies featuring the most successful wrestler turned actor since Hulk Hogan, two of these movies from film franchises, another movie from the most bombastic director working today, and “Snitch,” a family drama and thriller about the downside of federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws in regards to the oh-so-costly War on Drugs (copyright Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon).

“Snitch” is about a successful business owner named John Matthews (Johnson), who finds out that his estranged son Jason was arrested and put in federal prison for drug distribution. Now of course Jason isn’t a drug dealer, he just made a mistake and accepted a package from a “friend” that he shouldn’t have, but because of the mandatory sentencing laws, he is looking at 10 years in prison despite being a non-violent, first-time offender, and he is told the only way that he can possibly reduce his sentence would be to turn in another drug dealer to the government, or set up one of his friends in the same manner he was set up. So the government sets these rules in place in order to convince the small fish drug dealers to turn in their big fish drug dealing suppliers, but what happens is that the really small fish get caught in the same net and have no way of turning anyone in, so they get stuck with the full prison sentence, from which no person would ever come back the same.

Since Matthews feels partly responsible because his trucking job kept him on the road all the time, which led to his marriage falling apart and his distance with his son, he goes on a one man mission to try to get his son out of prison by bringing in a drug dealer himself. He even meets with the local district attorney (Susan Sarandon, Cloud Atlas), gets help from DEA (I think) Agent Cooper (Barry Pepper, Broken City) and recruits an unwitting accomplice in one of his ex-jailbird employees (Jon Bernthal, The Walking Dead), all in order to trap a bad guy so he can get his son of out prison faster.

This is actually a pretty good set up, and done pretty well in the movie, as it builds up to Matthews’ first attempt to get some evidence about drug dealers, which goes quite awry, and the story gets pretty tense as Matthews finally does manage to navigate his way through the criminal underworld, a seedy, dirty, gross underworld that feels a little too real. And of course this is 2013 so no movie about drugs can apparently go without bringing in the Mexican cartels somehow. Matthews works his way up the ladder and does many things he never thought he would do, and of course he quickly finds himself being used in more ways than one by the DA, but to him it doesn’t matter because it’s all for one thing, and that one thing is very clear, and it is pretty unquestionable, so it works as the driving motivator that keeps this movie humming along.

The problem with “Snitch” is how it wants to have it’s cake and eat it too, in that it is fine being a straightforward drug crime drama for most of the film, refusing to glamorize any aspects of the criminal lifestyle, but then switching gears in the final fifteen movies and becoming an action movie about a guy wrecking havoc with his truck and getting into high speed shoot-outs with drug dealers. I guess it was inevitable that this film would turn into any other in terms of movie-stylized violence, which is fine, don’t get me wrong, but the problem is that it leads to a false ending that doesn’t fit with the real problems presented in the movie. This is definitely supposed to be a polemic against the government’s drug policies and mandatory minimum laws, but really the movie doesn’t say anything more than “this is bad.”

They even bring up the fact that the DA was running for some sort of office (I forgot which, though I am sure it was not for re-election), but they did very little to try to tie this to anything else, like it was just expected of us to be like “oh yeah, the DA is just politicking” or something along those lines, as if an eye roll from Barry Pepper was some sort of grand political statement. It is kind of sad when a message movie that is so about it’s message really has so little to say about said message. Really, guys? Mandatory minimum laws are whack? Welcome to planet Earth. And let’s not bother with getting into any War on Drugs stuff, because we don’t want to muddle the message, right? The message of…mandatory minimum laws are bad? That’s it?

Really, the ultimate message of this movie is “don’t get caught by the Feds with drugs, and if you do get caught, get ready to roll over on someone quick, and also still be prepared to spend some time in prison no matter what, where you WILL be beaten and assaulted on a constant basis and apparently absolutely nothing will be done to stop it.” That message sucks, by the way.

The only reason to watch this movie is to see Dwayne Johnson because he is quite good in it. He definitely gives the most thoughtful and dramatic performance of his career, though this is like Schwarzenegger movies int he 90s, because we are expected to believe that the monstrous and muscle-bound Dwayne Johnson is walking around a bunch of mere mortals and no one ever mentions the fact that he is huge. And I mean HUGE. He towers over everyone at his trucking company, and no one ever stops and asks each other where this gigantic motherfucker came from? And then there’s a scene where he gets his ass kicked by guys less than half his size? Seriously? I just said Johnson is a good actor, but damn that still seemed absurd. I was constantly waiting for Johnson to power slam somebody, but it never happened. I don’t even think he throws a single punch. He just shoots some guns. Kind of a waste of a lot of physicality.

It’s like they had two different movies they wanted to make with the same story, but they didn’t know which one to pick, so they picked them both. They just scratch the surface of the family drama aspects, especially when Matthews sends his current wife and daughter away to hide, conveniently removing them from the rest of the story. They show this guy with his estranged wife and son and his current wife and daughter, and he obviously has regrets over his first failed marriage and apparently he wasn’t there for them at all and his success as a businessman left his son resentful of his father and his new family, and this is all rich thematic material that gets explored in literally two scenes between dad and son at the visitor’s window thingy at the prison. Why couldn’t they focus on this family drama bullshit? Because they had to deal with the mandatory minimum action movie bullshit, even though they took the same tact in neatly putting away whatever problems may arise by conveniently putting characters in places where they are safe and tucked away. And of course as mentioned before they don’t really do much with their “message” anyway, so it’s a good thing he kept the family drama stuff to a minimum.

“Snitch” not a bad movie, it’s actual quite watchable, and really Johnson is always fun to watch in any movie. Maybe it was how the movie ended with some on screen text spouting some facts about mandatory minimum sentences, at which point no one would have blamed you if you stood up in your seat in the middle of the theater, ripped out your hair, and shouted at the screen, “I get it! You hate mandatory sentences! It took you almost two hours to say that! We get it!