Set in Jim Crow-era Texas during World War I, Kevin Willmott’s “The 24th” dramatizes real-life events so inherently appalling — and so presently relevant — that we should never feel less than engaged. Yet this stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.
It’s the summer of 1917, and the all-Black 24th United States Infantry Regiment has been deployed to guard the construction of a training camp on the outskirts of Houston. Facing near-constant harassment and abuse from local law enforcement, the men, led by the volatile Walker (a fulminating Mo McRae), are additionally roiled by their distrust of a new recruit, Boston (Trai Byers), whose lighter skin and Sorbonne education set him apart.
Walker’s smarting, colorist attacks on his fellow soldier cause added unrest in a regiment already on edge. Its keen-eyed Colonel (Thomas Haden Church) offers to recommend Boston for officer training, but the soldier declines. It’s soon clear why: As drawn here, Boston isn’t just a man, he’s a paragon of selfless idealism, a martyr to injustice and racial hatred. In the Colonel’s words, he’s an admirable example of sacrifice over ambition.
This reliance on types rather than characters and signals over information — Boston’s intellect is established by a glimpse of him reading Booker T. Washington’s autobiography — is only one of the movie’s difficulties. When the regiment finally mutinies against the violently racist police force (in what became known as the Houston Riot and resulted in the largest murder trial in American history), the sequence should feel cathartic and moving. Instead, it’s confusingly indistinct, the action so murky it’s sometimes difficult to tell who is firing on whom.
Mixing fact with fiction, Willmott and Byers’s screenplay feels compressed and a little corny (as when the camera glides upward from the scene of a horrible beating to land on the American flag), the leads bearing so much weight of history they can barely breathe. A touching Aja Naomi King, as Boston’s love interest, is little more than a sketch, and the skilled Mykelti Williamson suffers a similar fate as a wily sergeant who understands all too well the likely consequences of their revolt.
Shot in just 18 days, “The 24th” is a movie desperately in need of nuance. Despite Byers’s attempts to humanize his rigidly upstanding character, it’s really McRae we need to watch: In too few scenes, he gives Walker the intensity of an unexploded bomb, his fury the vivid point of a film with so much death, yet far too little life.
The 24th
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch through select virtual cinemas; rent or buy on Vudu, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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‘The 24th’ Review: The Story Behind a Mutiny - The New York Times
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