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Andre, the protagonist of Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges (2019), was 13 when his father, an NYPD cop, was killed in the line of duty. When we meet Andre again (as Chadwick Boseman) decades later, we learn that he’s followed in his father’s footsteps — he’s among his department’s most venerated detectives — though approaches his duties with a fervor suggesting he’s trying to make up for the time his dad lost, for better and for worse. He’s good at catching criminals, but in the process has also acquired a trigger-happy reputation. (Though claiming self-defense, he’s killed eight men in nine years.) 

Andre’s intensity is put to good use in 21 Bridges, which quickly introduces itself as a manhunt (or menhunt) movie. A couple of dishonorably discharged Army men who have turned to a life of crime (Stephan James and Taylor Kitsch) steal, early in the movie, 300 kilograms of cocaine from a Brooklyn winery, though in the process of their theft kill an octet of police officers. When he’s assigned to the case, Andre declares it necessary to shut down all 21 of Manhattan’s river crossings until the early morning so that he and the partner he’s assigned, Frankie (Sienna Miller), can catch the men responsible.

Inevitably they will, and inevitably — because it’s, of course, a little suspicious that a wine store would have 300 kilograms of cocaine in its basement when there was originally thought to be just 30 — there will be something more complicated narratively at work. (That turns out to be a big conspiracy involving some of Andre’s co-workers; the movie is less condemnatory of the police than certain that, if there are people like Andre around, things will be all right in the end and order can be restored.) 

21 Bridges is a solid thriller; it’s also largely unremarkable aside from one kinetic foot-chase sequence. It at least gets excellent performances out of Boseman and James (the latter is especially good as a young man you can tell has gotten mixed up in a life he doesn’t fully believe in because he doesn’t know what else to do) and, a little surprisingly, Kitsch. 

Although maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, because it’s always been obvious, going back to his Friday Night Lights days, that parts like this one and in this kind of movie — supporting and small-scale, respectively — are a much better fit for him than the flashy action blockbusters Hollywood once believed, with the back-to-back releases of John Carter and Battleship in 2012, would turn him into a household name. He actually might be the best part of this movie that doesn’t do anything particularly unexpected. His live-wire character, more prone to impetuously acting on bad instincts than to thinking about anything for longer than a few seconds, feels genuinely unpredictable.