Premise: A veteran holds up a bank to get the VA to give him the money they owe him.
This is the kind of movie where being based on a true story really gets in the way. There really was a veteran who held two employees at a Wells Fargo bank hostage in Georgia. All he wanted was less than $1000 that the VA owed him and refused to give him due to a clerical error. He didn’t want to rob the bank. He just wanted the attention to get the VA to act. He was very polite to the hostages and even answered the phones for customers. He had a history of mental problems since returning from Iraq and said he had a bomb when he went into the bank. Finally, he was killed in the process. Sorry if any of this is a spoiler, but 1) it’s not like the story wasn’t publicized and 2) a lot of the spoiler stuff is pretty foregrounded in the movie.
That’s a lot of ill-fitting pieces to fit in the movie. A lot of limitations that push up against how films are normally written. How crazy should Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega) be? How sympathetic should he be? How can they play up the tension without making him seem like a bad guy? It’s tough, and that ultimately is the problem I have with 892. It’s not a very tense movie and actual events keep stepping on the story beats. There are no big escape attempts. The film never makes Brown-Easley feel that dangerous. It’s pretty obvious early on that he doesn’t actually have a bomb. Regardless of if you guess that, he says from the very beginning that if he lets the bomb go off, he was doing it alone, which negates the tension from having hostages.
It doesn’t help that I was thoroughly unimpressed with the filmmaker’s choices throughout. It’s too clear that they are on Brown-Easley’s side from the beginning. He had no menace, which defanged the whole thing. This differs from a Fruitvale Station. That move also canonized the protagonist too much, but that guy really didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to him. Brown-Easley did take people hostage and said he had a bomb. While shooting him was excessive, especially in hindsight, it’s also within the reasonable expectations of the situation he put himself in. He scarred two people with his actions, yet the movie positions it as the two employees (played by Nicole Beharie and Selenis Leyva) being scarred by the situation, not by Brown-Easley. On a visual filmmaking level, I don’t understand how Beharie and Leyva didn’t escape a half dozen times. Numerous times, he is looking away from them and the door for extended periods of time. He has a bomb, not a gun and he’s repeated that he has no intention of hurting them. The only reason they don’t escape in the movie is because they didn’t in real life. That took me out of the movie so much, and the only reason for it is poor visual filmmaking. Selenis Levya certainly works overtime to show her fear, but that’s a case of the performance trying to bail out the filmmaking.
Ignoring the story problems though, they did get good performances all around. John Boyega is excellent casting although it does misunderstand what he brings to this. Simply casting Boyega is going to make a character sympathetic. He lets you get away with more. Look at Detroit. His character in that, also based on a real person, kind of sucks. However, just by casting Boyega, that character can do everything wrong and the audience still wants to side with him. In 892, they treat him like he’s played by Will Poulter, who is the opposite of Boyega. He’s always somewhat menacing even if he’s being the nicest guy in the world. That said, Boyega brings exactly what he’s supposed to as a performer. He fills Brown-Easley with a ton of humanity. I was most impressed with Nicole Beharie. I know her name, but I hadn’t seen anything where she stood out this much before. Simply put, she’s a great bank manager. I love how well she plays someone keeping a calm face while being terrified on the inside. In the fictional version of this story, she would’ve been the protagonist of the movie who successfully arranges an escape and a live-capture of Brown-Easley. I’m definitely intrigued to see her in more. Selenis Leyva doesn’t get much more to do than be terrified, but she does that well. The big names in the supporting cast are Michael Kenneth Williams, Connie Britton, and Jeffrey Donovan. Nothing spectacular from any of them, but they do what’s asked of them. It’s kind of fitting that Michael Kenneth Williams’ final screen appearance would be a supporting role that he’s overqualified for.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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