Metro (1997)

Metro arrives in 1997 as a vehicle built for its star and little else. Eddie Murphy plays Scott Roper, a San Francisco hostage negotiator with a gift for talk and a taste for banter, and the film hands him a revenge plot involving a jewel thief named Korda who kills his friend and then comes for his ex-girlfriend. The casting of a Black lead in a mainstream action thriller was, by the standards of that decade, unremarkable. Carmen Ejogo and Kim Miyori fill supporting slots without the film pausing to remark on any of it. That absence of commentary is itself the finding. The movie holds no thesis about who deserves to be on screen. It wants Murphy in a car chase.

Ronnie Tate exists to be endangered. She is attacked in her apartment, kidnapped, and eventually pinned to a cutting machine while the villain negotiates, a device that reviewers at the time compared to the silent era's sawmill plank. No countervailing sensibility is offered. Korda is a thief driven by greed and a personal grudge, which makes this a cops and robbers story and nothing more. There is no environmental conscience, no examination of identity, no interest in bodies or minds that deviate from the action genre's default settings. The antagonist is a psychopath because the screenplay requires one, not because the film has anything to say about mental health.

The picture preaches nothing. It delivers banter, a cable car, a parking garage, an explosion. Thomas Carter later called the R rating his biggest career mistake. Michael Rapaport called the finished product wack on his podcast, complaining that the banter he and Murphy wanted had been trimmed. Murphy, for his part, said he liked it. We can report that Metro is entirely innocent of moral instruction, which in this ledger amounts to a kind of purity. A star vehicle from a moment when a star vehicle could be just that.