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Review: We Own This City is a heavy-handed return to The Wire territory

A scene from We Own This City, a new series about police in Baltimore that lives in the shadow of The Wire, according to our review
Jon Bernthal in a scene from We Own This City, which lives in the shadow of The Wire according to our review
Courtesy of Bell Media

WE OWN THIS CITY (Reinaldo Marcus Green). New episodes every Monday on Crave Canada beginning April 25. Rating: NNN


The Wire creators David Simon and George Pelecanos are back with another Baltimore cops-and-criminals saga; only in We Own This City, the cops are explicitly the criminals. That point is bolded and underlined throughout the six-part series, which lacks the earlier show’s nuance, finesse and overall greatness.

The Wire is arguably the crown jewel of television. Living in its shadow is an unenviable position. We Own This City acquits itself well enough as a tough and damning diatribe on the war on drugs policies and practices that make police corruption easy and rewarding.

The fact-based series, directed with a heavy hand by King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green, adapts journalist Justin Fenton’s book about Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) officers who were stealing from the people they arrest, whether those detainees were dealers or just working-class citizens guilty of driving while Black.

Officers in the GTTF unit would tax what they seize from raids before they made their way to the evidence room, stuffing stacks of cash under their body armour and selling oxy back to dealers. As if those proceeds weren’t enough, they would also charge overtime hours… while on vacation.

They would operate with a sense of entitlement and impunity because they put enough guns, cash and drugs on the table to make politicians feel like they were winning the war on drugs. Or at least that was the spin. Simon and Pelecanos have always made sure to fill out the macro, this time connecting the dots between those policies that get people re-elected and street monsters like GTTF Sgt. Wayne Jenkins.

Jon Bernthal plays Jenkins with a blistering mix of dick-swinging, entitlement and conviction. We Own This City opens with him giving young cadets a lecture that seems to be weaning them off police brutality but somehow ends up encouraging them to find creative ways to get away with police brutality. By the time he’s done with the triggering and dizzying speechifying, it’s hard to look back and pinpoint where exactly the lesson goes wrong. The brilliance in Bernthal’s brute force performance is that he somehow seems to make Jenkins’s worldview make sense to himself. It’s hard to tell if Jenkins really did believe he’s a great cop who just profits off criminal proceeds because he’s owed for the impactful work he does.

Bernthal makes We Own This City come alive. Others like McKinley Belcher III and Darrell Britt-Gibson as Jenkins’s accomplices, or Don Harvey and Dagmara Dominczyk as investigators, don’t fare as well, despite giving really strong performances. They’re given much less to work with as characters in Jenkins’s orbit who can only hint at given inner lives in straight-faced environments.

We Own This City often feels handcuffed because it’s based on fact. Unlike The Wire, which had the room to invent while incorporating off-the-record material that David Simon could use from his journalism days, We Own This City is thoroughly by the book, refusing to overstep those boundaries.

The show’s case-files structure also tends to drag as it shuffles through testimony during 2017 depositions, struggling to find a compelling rhythm while mapping out the GTTF’s crimes and investigation. Episodes leap back and forth in time, beginning in the early Aughts, when The Wire was still on the air and Jenkins was cutting his teeth as a beat cop learning all the wrong lessons, and ending with Jenkins’s conviction. The timeline also hops before and after the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray. The galvanizing tragedy hangs over the entire narrative and informs the contrast between We Own This City and The Wire.

The earlier series, which comes from the time before cellphones and body cameras were ubiquitous, confidently tells it how it is with feeling and poetry. And for the most part, The Wire let audiences come to their own conclusions. We Own This City, on the other hand, is facts told with heavy doses of editorializing, as if in a post-George Floyd era the show needs to make its conclusions ring out as loud as a BLM march.

To that end, Wunmi Mosaku appears in the most thankless role. Her fictional attorney Nicole Steele works at the Department of Justice. She’s resolved to find out in the aftermath of Freddie Gray how to fix the Baltimore police department. Her real function is to hold the audience’s hand through the political theatre and structural problems in the police force, engaging in conversations with various experts who explain in long-winded expository monologues why the war on drugs encourages bad policing. When making bad arrests gets you more overtime pay, and pulling random people over on the street (justified by creative paperwork) gets more rewarding stats, why bother taking the time to do real policing?

The truth of it all is infuriating and illuminating. But there was a time when Simon and Pelecanos found electrifying ways to show it instead of tell it.

Listen to our interview with The Wire and We Own This City creator David Simon on the NOW What podcast available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or playable directly below.

Read More:

Defund police budgets that fuel the war on drugs, says The Wire creator

@justsayrad

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