Murder City has Colter as a semi-corrupt cop who decides to take his dad (Antonio Fargas) up on an offer to make some easy cash by doing a drop off and pick up of some illicit stuff. Turns out the DEA was wise to it, and both of them get clipped. After two years in the can, Colter is out and trying to pick up the pieces of his life. Local crime boss Stephanie Sigma has been messing with his wife and son, and not only that, she's upset that Fargas sounds like he's going to cut a deal with the DEA to bring her down. He offers to work for her as hired muscle, while at the same time he's working undercover to get the goods on Sigman so he can bring her down himself. All of this sounds like it should work out really easily, right?
This wasn't bad. It was slow in a few spots, but with the short runtime, that was mitigated. Colter was great too, along with Sigman as the baddie, and Fargas as the dad. On the other hand, the powerful crime boss stuff got repetitive, no matter how good Colter and Sigman were. You can only see it so much: Colter thinks he's making headway, but she's one step ahead because she's got "eyes all over the city." Like when his wife and son go to a hotel to get away, we know it's only a matter of time before Sigman's goons fine them--and when they do, we get a particularly brutal beating of Colter's wife, played by Medina Senghore. The action was sparse, as this was more of a suspense kind of story, but what we got wasn't bad, especially the fight Colter has with Anderson Silva, who plays Sigman's right-hand man. I think if this didn't have Colter in it, it would've felt more run-of-the-mill, but because it did, he made it a more enjoyable ride.
Looking at Colter's IMDb bio, he doesn't have a lot of DTV stuff, and in a way I was relieved to see that, as it means his career is still doing well in the upper tiers of the industry. This one may have come across his desk as some extra money, or maybe something that was going to be bigger than it was. The thing is, the character he played could've been more compelling in a different setting, like maybe a remake of a Bad Lieutenant, where he starts out like he does here, only pinching a couple hundred bucks here or there from lower-level drug pushers he catches, and then it starts to spiral, either with a gambling addiction like Keitel had in Bad Lieutenant, or maybe it's a mental spiraling like Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. There's a sense in watching Colter play this part that he had more to give it, but this story wasn't built for that. I don't know if we'll see him again on here, because he's doing more big-budget films and he has a broadcast TV show, but at the very least it was great to see him this one time. And if you haven't yet, you should check out Luke Cage on Disney+. Colter is Luke Cage, and hopefully with the new Daredevil show coming, they'll bring him back to reprise his Cage as well.
As much as this was run-of-the-mill, Stephanie Sigman was a great baddie. She had this calm demeanor that we all knew was a facade over her true sinister nature, giving every scene she's in a vibe of tension and impending danger, and then when the more overt stuff came out, it made it all the more chilling. I think with someone with the kind of screen presence Colter has, a baddie has to be truly special to make us believe that she could scare Colter, and Sigman does that. Speaking of Luke Cage and the Marvel Defenders shows, another villain she brings to mind is Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin, but part of what makes him so scary is his imposing size, and that makes the fact that Sigman could pull this off so well that much more impressive. Like Colter, I'm not sure how much more we'll see her on the site, but she has a few things that may end up on here, so you never know.
We last saw Antonio Fargas in Night of the Sharks, which was our post in honor of the late Treat Williams. Unlike Colter and Sigman, we'd expect to see Fargas on here more, but this is only his fourth film. I looked at his bio, and while there are some we could've done, his stuff doesn't overlap with what we do as much as you'd think. What I liked about his performance here, was this was straight-ahead serious with no goofing around. I imagine that's why he would've taken this role, because it wasn't just another version of Huggy Bear, he got to do something else, and he did really well with it.
Finally, in addition to being a Tubi Original, this is also a Fox Entertainment Studios production. I was curious what else they'd done, since Fox sold off their 20th Century Fox movie arm to Disney, and it turns out according to IMDb not much. There's this, 2023's Cinnamon, two hacky-looking Right Wing culture war animated films, and another animated film called Big Bruh. All of these are also Tubi Originals, which makes sense, because Fox owns Tubi. It seems like they might be slowly inching back into the movie game, nowhere near at the score they were at before, but at least involved; while it looks like in Deadpool and Wolverine this summer we have a scene where the 20th Century Fox logo is buried in the dirt as a relic of the past, symbolizing what once was. It is interesting that they had all of these Marvel properties, especially the X-Men, and they couldn't hit Disney and Marvel Studio's success, but when you look at films like Deadpool and read that they cut the budget and wouldn't pay for a Wolverine appearance, you can see how they mismanaged their assets even on relative successes like that. I guess we'll see what this new direct to Tubi iteration does now.
And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on Tubi here in the States, and as a free streamer it's not a bad deal. It had a run-of-the-mill plot that we've seen often, but the performances and the runtime elevate it to something a bit better.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2583014
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.
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