In the near future, Frank Grieves is a new breed of police officer working in a city where all recreational drugs are legal. When he is taken off a case involving an unidentified corpse, he discovers that legalization has come at a price.
Director: Justin Trefgarne
Writer: Justin Trefgarne
Stars: Elliot Cowan, Elodie Yung, Jonathan Pryce
Story:
There are some interesting ideas and no little visual ambition on display in this feature directing debut from Justin Trefgarne, a noirish techno-thriller set in the not too distant future that aims to marry Blade Runner-ish tropes with the scuzzy urban drug movie. Despite the surface sheen, and some enterprising plot twists, it doesn’t entirely convince.
Opening with a Matrix-y prologue set in 2044, during which a couple of tech-ninja types surreptitiously break into a vaguely threatening computer mainframe, Narcopolis shoots back 20 years, to 2024, to a not-quite-London where recreational drugs are no longer illegal, and hardbitten cops are employed putting unlicensed dealers out of business, and mopping up after nasty unauthorised overdoses. Our protagonist is called Frank (Elliot Cowan), a sort of Sweeney-ish answer to Blade Runner’s Deckard, though without Harrison Ford’s elegant loucheness. Frank finds a corpse missing half its head in a storage locker, apparently the victim of some baffling new super-drug no one has encountered before.
Before long Frank finds himself clashing with his boss (who we find out a drug-fuelled Frank accidentally shot in the face during an earlier bust), fending off the attentions of emissaries from a sinister legal-drugs corporation called Ambro, and trying to maintain a semblance of a relationship with his estranged wife and kid. Plus he has to track down a mysterious woman who has something to do with half-head-corpse but who doesn’t seem to want to help him, as well as trying to get some sense out of a cryptic scientist called Sidorov (Jonathan Pryce) who appears to be allergic to technology.
Got all that? It’s fair to say that Narcopolis has got a lot going on, but suffers from a resulting lack of clarity. This is the kind of film where one moment our protagonist is pulling his gun on a stranger in a nightclub toilet, and a few minutes later is mournfully discussing HG Wells with his nine-year-old son. It’s not exactly confusing – though it could be a little clearer about some basic contextual information – but rather it frantically bounces from one subplot to another, with decidedly mixed results. It does look good, with dramatic lighting and impressive location choices, but it’s never quite enough to overcome the film’s coherence issues. That said, this is a useful calling-card movie from Trefgarne, who ought to go on to better things.
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