The Land’s first two sequences offer a remarkable contrast in sympathies. We open with a montage of our four leads, seniors in high school, mumbling their way through a dressing-down session from their guidance counsellor. They are delinquents who, if they are lucky, could get jobs as mechanics. After gazing at their glum faces, we cruise alongside them as they skateboard through Cleveland’s dingier streets. A man on his way home is whapped unconscious by our quartet and has his car stolen (and sold to a breaker’s yard for $75). Just when we were starting to feel sorry for these kids.
Writer-director Steven Caple Jr’s grim social-realist portrait of at-risk young people offers no solutions, which is a valid artistic choice, but likewise offers little originality or drama. This is misery porn with no climax, and ultimately a double-whammy of liberal guilt. Not only must we feel bad for the kids born into these circumstances, there’s the added discomfort that the movie can’t get us to care.
Doing the best he can with flimsy material is Jorge Lendeborg Jr as Cisco, a good kid despite the occasional theft and battery. He lives with his ex-junkie uncle (Kim Coates) in a repulsive greasy spoon that doubles as a makeshift brothel for a strung-out hanger-on, played by Erykah Badu. The only thing Cisco is good at is skateboarding with his buddies, which include the fun one (Moises Arias), the angelic one (Ezri Walker) and the ladies’ man (Rafi Gavron).
There’s a local skate competition they know they’d win if they only had money for the entry fees, but the concept of working at McDonald’s for chump change is less than enticing. They decide to jack another car and, wouldn’t you know it, they accidentally pick one belonging to a local drug runner. But those sacks of MDMA in the trunk may be their ticket to freedom, Cisco thinks, because he’s never seen a movie before.
The scenes of the kids selling drugs and enjoying some power are shot with pizazz, as are Moises Arias’s few scenes at his cold, underlit home with his overworked, caring father (Michael Kenneth Williams in a tender cameo). The film’s sole twist comes when we are introduced to the crime boss who wants to find the pesky kids that stole the stash. We’re anticipating another typical tough guy in an undershirt dropping F-bombs, but it turns out to be a deceptively sweet-looking older white lady (Linda Emond).
Emond has some fun with the part, but with every other beat and performance in The Land completely by the numbers, her scenes feel like they’ve been spliced in from a more entertaining movie. Accepting this unexpected role, even if meant more for symbolic purposes, demands a suspension of disbelief. Momma, as she is called, is a hardworking small business owner hawking artisanal foods, but between loading bags of flour she’s got time, of course, to run a menacing drug operation. Some women really can have it all.
The Land’s eventual violent conclusion is set on the Fourth of July, again, possibly for some deeper meaning, but quite likely just because gun blasts amid slow-mo fireworks look cool. There are sequences of the four prowling the streets on their boards with a fatalist, sinister beauty that show Caple Jr is more than capable of crafting striking compositions. Unfortunately, the jump from image-making to storytelling in this case fails to stick the landing.
• The Land is released in the UK on 29 July
