Code 8 (2019)

Code 8 arrives as a crowdfunded Canadian superhero picture, which is itself the most interesting thing about it. The Amell cousins play an electrokinetic day laborer and the telekinetic criminal who recruits him, and the near-future Lincoln City runs on a familiar arrangement: citizens with powers built the city of tomorrow, then were discarded once automation made them redundant. The class resentment is real and it simmers. Powers are surveilled by militarized police, priced out of medical care, and harvested for the spinal fluid that becomes the street drug Psyke. The screenplay never stops to explain what any of this means, which is to its credit. It lets the exploitation sit there, a premise in a crime film that happens to have drones in it.

The cast is largely white and largely Canadian, with Sung Kang and Alex Mallari Jr. occupying supporting slots that could have gone to anyone. Diversity is present without being a thesis. Nia and Maddy are given competence and a measure of interiority, but the film remains a male-led heist narrative with no articulated argument about gender. There is no queer presence of any kind, and the romantic arrangements are strictly conventional. Freddie's muteness registers as a character detail, not a portrait of neurodivergence. The film has no interest in bodies, ecology, or the rewriting of history. Its dystopia is economic and technological. The weather is fine.

The film treats its themes as plot mechanics. Discrimination is the engine of the heist, not the subject of a speech. No character turns to the camera, literal or figurative, to instruct us on the moral architecture of Lincoln City. There are gestures toward a persecuted class and a detective whose daughter is telekinetic, but the film declines to connect any of it to the politics of the world outside the frame. The result is a solid genre exercise that carries progressive undertones the way a coat carries lint: incidentally, and without much conviction.