The Enforcer (2022)

In the crowded ledger of 2022's morally instructive cinema, The Enforcer arrives as a relief of sorts, a Miami noir thriller content to be a Miami noir thriller. Antonio Banderas plays Cuda, an enforcer who turns on the organization he spent a lifetime building once he learns its cyber sex trafficking operation has swallowed a young runaway under his protection. The cast is diverse in the effortless way of a modern ensemble: Banderas, 2 Chainz, Zolee Griggs, Mojean Aria. Miami is a diverse city. The film notices this and moves on, which is precisely the correct amount of noticing.

Kate Bosworth's Estelle rules the operation with the cold poise of a classic femme fatale, and the film treats her as an archetype, not a thesis. Her power is a genre inheritance, not a statement. The women here are victims or villains, sometimes both in sequence, and the screenplay has no interest in auditing that arrangement. Nor does it audit anything else. The trafficking ring is a criminal enterprise, not a metaphor for late capitalism. No character pauses to explain the carceral state. The climate does not enter the frame. Nobody is on a journey of self-acceptance regarding their body.

There is a faint moral hum beneath the violence, the kind any story about trafficked children generates without trying. The film does not amplify it into a sermon. It stages shootouts instead. Critics were unkind, and the Rotten Tomatoes number reflects a picture that never quite escapes the crowded pack. For our purposes, the progressive ledger comes up nearly empty: a couple of entries, faintly penciled, and a great deal of blank paper. The Enforcer is a genre exercise that knows what it is. That is not a compliment. It is a classification.