Asphalt City Review

There's no shortage of films based on a specific profession, from firefighting ("Backdraft") to storm chasing ("Twister"), but frequently Hollywood finds a most bare-bones narrative tying the action together (a serial arsonist and a divorcing couple, respectively). But not "Asphalt City," a brutal depiction of paramedics that has about as much plot as a documentary.

It has more in common with 1988's crime picture "Colors" by Dennis Hopper, which starred Sean Penn as the inexperienced cop and Robert Duvall as the more senior one. This time, we follow veteran EMS person Gene (Penn, coincidentally) and a rookie Ollie (Tye Sheridan) throughout New York as they respond to drug overdoses, emergency pregnancies, dead bodies, domestic violence, asthma attacks, dog bites, and more; pretty much every bad situation you could think of on the job. And the point? Well, there really isn't any on the surface. There isn't much explicit characterization of either man outside the fact that Gene's recently divorced (again) and Ollie is trying (again) to get into med school. The film cuts between bursts of extreme chaos and violence to scenes of the duo sitting in near silence as they take turns sleeping in the ambulance. The camera shakes and the music is repetitive and bombastic, making every disorientating moment for them disorientating for us. This is, at its core, an excellent piece of gritty, exploitative film making.

It's the kind of film where it is nearly impossible to catch the character's names, because introductions occur either in silence or off-screen; you end up listening intently to every line hoping to hear someone's moniker, or else you wait until the credits to know. (Or in other words, you wait to read IMDB for who-played-who.)

But "Asphalt City" never rises above being an exhaustive look into the seedy underbelly of NYC, with streets filled with trash, violence and anger like an old Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson film from the 70's. Early on, Gene give Ollie two or so weeks on the job, knowing what this gig can do to you, but Ollie is a cockeyed optimist who only wants to save people. To Gene, however, it's just a job that pays the bills (and his ex-wife's rent, so that he can see his daughter). Mostly, but I don't want to give anything away. The two grow close only because of circumstance and nothing else, and both men play their parts with confidence and seriousness.

There's a subplot involving this girl Ollie met at a club, Clara (Raquel Nave), who spends all but two scenes exposing her breasts and frequently a lot more. Her role is just as much sex appeal as it is to help display how day-after-day of mayhem can lead someone down a path of rage and hate, with Ollie going from being happy to play with her infant to choking her in one of the film's many relatively graphic sex scenes. He goes from looking for companionship to a pent-up release of emotions, frequently told through action over dialogue. 

And there's more insinuation than actual explanation, like how Gene chews on toothpicks on all but his last scene, where we see him puffing on a cigarette. Why? Well you be the judge, but the more you think about the individual moments that fly by seemingly at random, the more you want to learn about the trials and tribulations of real paramedics and not just what writers Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown dolled up for tinseltown.

Of course, this is based on the book Black Flies by Shannon Burke, based on his own experiences, but then again, this is shot more like a docudrama than documentary.

But for all the unorganized anarchy of the first two acts, the third act suddenly decides to give us something that resembles a plot, where Gene and Ollie are faced with trying to save a drug-using, HIV-positive mother and her home-birthed preterm baby. The decision to abruptly challenge the morality of the job feels more scripted than spontaneous, and by the time the unexpectedly optimistic route of redemption of the ending, which I will not spoil, rolls around, you feel betrayed. We see the relentless decay of men as they fail to properly deal with stress and handle their egos, only to chicken out with a "feel good" finale. Well, as close to a "feel good" finale considering its subject matter. 

"Asphalt City" works best when it's just a couple of guys doing a job, a job that just so happens to involve saving people, both the good and the bad. Once it start asking questions about the philosophy on what's happening, you realize it not only doesn't have an answer, but also doesn't know why it doesn't.