SPLASH CITY may not be the most original of films, but it knows how to capture a mood and set a scene. Specifically, that of the meaner streets of San Francisco, where, as is pointed out, the Silicon Valley money doesn’t trickle down to the people living on the edge of the economy. For them, the quick money and de rigeur decadence of crime seem like the most reasonable career path. And the casual violence of words and guns that fuels an institutional rage.
Co-directors Berner and Alex Ferrufino certainly know how to wield a camera, giving us haunting images of shadows edged in light and neon searing the night. It helps to mitigate the narrative clichés that bombard us as the story unfolds. The biggest asset they have, though, is star Reed Shannon as Juju, the younger brother of Slim (Zach Sowers), a murdered basketball phenom who was about to hit the big time after breaking away from dealing drugs and smashing car windows. Shannon is nuanced, balancing the hurt of being the less-favored son with idolizing the apple of his mother’s eye. There is a calm to him that is edgy, that of a little boy playing at being a man when he is not quite sure what that means. And even less sure of where he fits in the world. The wary eyes with which Juju looks out on that world after his brother’s funeral show a grief that is beyond pain.
When Slim is murdered and the police unable to find the killer, Juju sinks further into the underworld, mentored by Dolo, Slim’s former best friend from the old days. Played with hair-trigger menace by Quincy Brooks, Dolo is a mercurial psychopath with bling and bravado and a sense of honor that has nothing to do with chivalry. Or loyalty. We are in a world of transactional relationships and money that might be easy, but not free. Deals go bad, glass from broken car windows flies, blood is shed and Juju embraces it as the hole in his soul grows larger with each transgression.
The tour of this part of San Francisco has a textured sense of authenticity filtered through thoughtful camera work. The sights and sounds. The patois, preening, and posturing that follows rules that are as strict as a catechism. There are high-end jewelry stores, smoky clubs with hard-as-nails strippers, and criminal lairs that run the gamut from ramshackle to affluent. That authenticity includes the tenseness that sudden death hovers nearby at all times and in any situation.
If SPLASH CITY starts with a series of hoary tropes that echo dully, the arc of many a film of this genre that have come before, by the end it has pulled itself together enough to deliver a climax with genuine uncertainty fueling that action. And that monumental performance by Shannon, chin jutting, eyes a mask over his soul, carries it over the finish line.
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