16 Blocks

Here’s your edge-of-the-seat police thriller in the mode of “Speed” in that it also involves a bus. However, director Richard Donner’s “16 Blocks” does not depend on keeping a bus running at a certain speed so it won’t blow up; the characters and plot keep moving at a certain speed to keep the characters from blowing up.

Bruce Willis, like George Clooney in “Syriana,” allowed himself to go to seed for his character, Jack Mosely, a New York police detective. Willis is almost unrecognizable as he shuffles into the precinct: graying mustache, worry-wrinkled forehead, sagging midriff, rumpled, slept-in clothes. He’s tolerated by his fellow cops and superiors, who look the other way when Mosely dumps his empties from his desk drawer into a wastebasket. He is given only the lowliest of assignments, one of which seemed simple enough: drive a beaten-down, garrulous prisoner, Eddie Bunker (a brilliant Mos Def), sixteen blocks to the courthouse where Bunker is scheduled to testify to a grand jury.

Everything’s fine until Mosely stops off at a liquor store; then things start to get weird. Seems his old buddy on the force, Frank Nugent, played by David Morse, backed by others, have intervened. They don’t want Mosely to complete his mission and show it by drawing guns. Mosely snaps out of his booze-induced haze into instinctual cop mode, while a confused Bunker flails about wild-eyed, unsure of whom he should believe.

Abandoning the vehicle, Willis and Def must now elude the others on foot through the back alleys, subterranean kitchens and laundries of New York’s Chinatown. In the scenes where Mosely and Bunker wait things out in hiding, Bunker reveals himself to have not only smarts, but also trust, and a realistic goal of one day owning his own bakery in the Pacific Northwest where his sister lives.

Outside of some preposterous belief-suspending scenes - - once the two have commandeered a bus and Willis drives it careening through narrow streets, on sidewalks, scraping sides of buildings, and tossing cars about (no one on the bus is hurt!) and have taken its passengers and driver hostage - - the film offers an “awwwww-geeeee” ending worthy of Frank Capra. To Donner’s credit, he does not have Mos Def playing the black comic to straight white man Bruce Willis, but shows Def’s character to be a guy with brains who can engage us with the seriousness of his delivery. Def and Willis play nicely off each other.

“16 Blocks” is in major theatres in San Francisco and the Bay Area.