Exit Wounds (2001)

Exit Wounds arrives from 2001, a moment when a Steven Seagal vehicle could still open at number one and be received as a comeback. Andrzej Bartkowiak directs with the grim efficiency he brought to Romeo Must Die, rendering Detroit as a rain-slicked circuit of warehouses and evidence lockers, a city instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time in Toronto. The plot concerns stolen heroin, a framed man, and a billionaire who pretends to be a drug dealer. It is a programmer, and it makes no apology for being one.

The cast is notably Black for a mainstream action picture of its era: DMX, Isaiah Washington, Anthony Anderson, Michael Jai White, Bill Duke. This arrangement flows from the hip-hop-inflected production model Joel Silver was operating, not from any casting initiative, and the film never stops to admire it. Jill Hennessy's Captain Mulcahy runs a precinct and shuts Boyd down with real coolness. She is then killed in a parking garage so the hero has something to feel. The device is as old as the genre, and no quantity of screen presence redeems it from that purpose. The story's racial dimension, a Black man framed by white detectives, is handled as ordinary crime plotting, with no reach toward injustice as a theme.

Elsewhere the ledger is nearly empty. The villains are corrupt policemen running a heroin ring for private profit, which is avarice without an argument; the wealthy man is the hero, so no redistributive reading survives contact with the screenplay. There is no environmental anxiety, no body politics, no neurological interiority, no history requiring revision. The film lectures no one. It hits people, and then it stops. In an era that would soon demand its entertainments explain themselves, this one simply refuses, and there is a certain integrity in that refusal. A relic, then. Catalogued accordingly.