Delayed Reaction: LA 92

The Pitch: It's been 25 years. Let's find all the riot footage.

A ground-level documentary about the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

I didn't need to watch that. I mean, there's value in knowing about the riots. It's a well made documentary that sets up why the rioting happened. Without any narration beyond the occasional text card, it covers the days leading up to and following the decision on the police officers who beat Rodney King, which set off the rioting. It captures the anger and the frustration in the black community that led to such an eruption. It covers the volatile Korean/African American relations in the city.

The greatest value of the documentary though was the days of footage collected during the riot. There's another movie about this made the same year called Burn Motherfucker Burn and I get why they chose that title. These riots were nuts. I'm barely young enough to not remember the '92 riots, so it was shocking to me to see this kind of mayhem in a major American city.

I think this movie had the opposite of the intended effect on me though. I was totally on board with the frustration and anger early on. The more violence and especially the more looting it showed, the more cynical I got about the real reasons for the riot. The footage started feeling gratuitous by the end. I think something like the L.A. Riot segment of O.J.: Made in America did a much better job of giving everything context and explaining the failures of how everything was handled then. LA 92 seemed to be more about "hey, here's a guy getting the shit beat out of him" and "look at these people whose lives have just been ruined". I guess my issue was less with the quality than preferred style of the doc. Certainly, if you want to know what the riots looked like, this does a great job.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend