L.A. Riots Thriller 1992 Steals Time and Not Much Else
Set during the first few hours of the Los Angeles riots of April 1992 after the Rodney King verdict was announced, the dramatic thriller 1992 ends up doing frustratingly little of interest. Director Ariel Vromen (Criminal, The Iceman) and co-writer Sascha Penn (Creed II) have crafted an intriguing enough scenario. Unfortunately, they don’t do much that’s memorable with any of it. As missed opportunities go, sadly this one hit me as being fairly massive.
Mercer Bey (Tyrese Gibson) is a man with a dark past who is trying to rebuild his life outside of the L.A. gangs who still revere him. His primary focus is his estranged teenage son Antoine (Christopher A’mmanuel). When the Rodney King verdict is announced, violence quickly engulfs the city. Wanting to protect Antoine from harm, he decides the safest place for them to hole up would be the factory where he works as a security guard as the place is a fortified citadel that would require a small army to conquer.
What Mercer does not know is that a group of thieves led by the cutthroat Lowell (Ray Liotta) have already infiltrated the factory. They’re after a cache of platinum, and all they need to do is crack a-not-so-impenetrable safe and they’ll all be set for life. Initially planned by Lowell’s son Riggin (Scott Eastwood) as a quick in and out, no fuss no muss heist, things go horrifically haywire, and Mercer unexpectedly finds both he and Antoine are at the epicenter of the madness.
Vromen does a solid job of introducing Mercer and showing that, for all his attempts to avoid calling attention to himself, he is not someone to be messed with. Gang members show deference to him. Youngsters are told to stay in his good graces. A glare from him in the local convenience store is enough to dissuade those with bad intentions to rethink what they were about to do. It also helps that Gibson is excellent in the role.
It’s clear Lowell is not someone to take lightly as well, but that has more to do with the actor portraying the character than anything Vromen does directorially. This is Liotta’s final performance, and it takes him all of about 15 seconds to coldly glare in Eastwood’s general direction for anyone watching the film to realize he’s one bad mother…well…you get the idea. This guy may claim to be retired, but it doesn’t take a lot of convincing to get Lowell involved in the heist and, once he’s onboard, it’s not exactly shocking he’ll sacrifice everyone and anyone if that’s what it takes to make a career-defining score.
All of that would be fine if every emotional beat wasn’t a foregone conclusion from the first moment Mercer steps foot inside the factory and discovers that there’s a robbery taking place. It doesn’t matter that Lowell ends up holding Antoine hostage or that Riggin is having second thoughts about working alongside his father. There’s no question which elder statesman with a violent past will be willing to do whatever it takes to see that their progeny is the one who survives the night.
Worse, Vromen and Penn do a poor job of making their story’s setting matter beyond anything other than the superficial. Unlike Ron Shelton’s flawed, yet still deeply fascinating 2002 Kurt Russell thriller Dark Blue, the L.A. riots are only background noise. While that film managed to ask some complex, deeply unsettling questions about race, gender, power dynamics, and political corruption (especially as it pertains to law enforcement) if there was any overarching message to 1992, sorry to say I couldn’t see it, and that’s too bad.
I can say that cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco (All is Lost) shoots the heck out of the picture, crafting a deeply immersive milieu of grit, anxiety, and slowly enveloping darkness that’s suitably suffocating. In addition, Vromen does a fine job keeping things moving, the filmmaker setting a vigorous pace that generates aggressively energetic bursts of tension, especially during the frantic game of cat-and-mouse when Mercer and Antoine first enter the factory and Lowell, Riggin, and the rest of the crew realize they have unexpected visitors
Ultimately, the voluminous shortcomings littered throughout 1992 are too obnoxious and frustrating to ignore. While it’s nice to see Liotta do his steely-eyed heavy routine one last time, and even if Gibson is fully invested (and gives one of the better performances of his career), their work alone wasn’t enough to keep me invested in anything that was happening. As heists go, the only thing stolen here was just over 90 minutes of my time.
Film Rating: 2 (out of 4)
