By John Serba

Night Patrol (now on Shudder) mashes up L.A. cops-vs.-gangsters drama with supernatural horror-thrillers with enough ambition and vision to compel you to admire it. Director/co-writer Ryan Prows graduates from indie passion projects (2017’s Lowlife) to lo-fi horror (a segment of V/H/S/94) to this new slightly less lo-fi, but still indie outing boasting a few familiar faces in Justin Long, Dermot Mulroney, Jermaine Fowler and RJ Cyler. And in many ways, it’s very much a John Carpenter homage, aiming for the sweet spot between Assault on Precinct 13 and Vampires – now let’s see if he hits it.

NIGHT PATROL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Wazi Carr (Cyler, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) is cuffed to a table in an interrogation room. It’s a damning portrait of the LAPD that he bleeds from an object jammed between his ribs, and a cop pressures him to sign a confession or release form of some kind instead of treating his injuries. What the hell is going on around here? Well, we jump back a couple of days, when Wazi meets up with his girlfriend. It’s a Romeo and Juliet-like sitch, because he’s a Crip and she’s a Blood, but before anyone can get to the wherefore-art-thous, the LAPD rolls up on them and officer Hawkins (Long) puts a bullet in her head. Wazi escapes through a plot hole, but hey, at least the plot is moving, and successfully pulling us in.

Wazi goes to the Bloods, led by Bornelius (Freddie Gibbs) and Three Deuce (Flying Lotus), to explain to them what happened. They go to fetch her body, but find it gruesomely dismembered; Wazi wasn’t present for that. He knows Bornelius is all about “conspiriocracies” (yes, ha ha), and the Blood leader senses some “residual Satanic energy” at the scene. OK! But supernaturalishness isn’t foreign around these parts – Wazi’s mother Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux) is a medicine-woman type immersed deep in Zulu mythology, and she’s dead serious about it. She makes Wazi hand out informative pamphlets about Zulu magick and whatnot, as their neighbors in the housing project laugh in their faces. 

Complicating the scenario is Wazi’s older brother Xavier (Fowler), who not only happens to be an LAPD beat cop, but Hawkins’ partner. Every LAPDer in this movie exists somewhere on the Shitbag Spectrum, and while Xavier isn’t too terrible – outside of being seen as a traitor by his mom and sibling – Hawkins, the son of a highly celebrated cop who died on the job, yearns to be a primo Shitbag. The aforementioned execution he, er, executes is at the behest of the leaders of the Night Patrol, a special LAPD squad that operates, as the name implies, only after dark. What could the Night Patrol be up to, I wonder? I doubt it’s a sewing circle or book club, because you no doubt recall the old adage that nothing good ever happens after midnight, in a Gremlins movie or anywhere, really. I’m pretty sure they’re all white guys, which of course is another way of saying “pale.” And whatever it is they’re doing, it might be wild enough to incite not just a truce between the Crips and Bloods, but a temporary union.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I’m pretty sure the new trajectory of most/all vampire films is going to be heavily Sinners-coded from here on out (although similarities are most likely coincidental for Night Patrol). Otherwise, we have shades of everything from Boyz n the Hood to Training Day and Near Dark in Prows’ arsenal of influences. 

Performance Worth Watching: Long goes memorably feral in the film’s second half, a performance that sure seems like it wouldn’t have happened without residual trauma from being the protagonist of Tusk. 

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s no doubting Prows’ ambition, and he directs Night Patrol as if it’s his last film and he wants to cram as much into it as possible. But all that ambition cuts into the film’s effectiveness as a coherent, streamlined narrative. It’s a tonal hodgepodge that can’t decide if it wants to be an intense, poker-faced, issues-driven drama beneath the mayhem, or a satire of age-old gangbangers-and-cops tropes. We’re deep into the third act and Prows is still stirring new thematic fodder into the mix, when everything would likely be tighter and more comprehensible if he stuck to the central metaphor of corrupt cops feeding on the lifeblood of a community. 

Humor is deployed in infrequent stabs, characters behave erratically, dramatic reveals tend to be less effective than they should be, and the whole shebang threatens to spin apart during a climax that feels underwhelming when it should be delivering an exhilarating payoff. Yet the performances keep us intrigued, as Cyler, Long, Fowler and Micheaux give their characters more nuance and depth than you might expect from most genre fare. But as ever, a mixed bag like this is far better than one where the bottom drops out.

Our Call: Getting my hands around Night Patrol was a greater struggle than it should be. Prows shows plenty of stylistic moxie as a filmmaker, and I feel better looking forward to his next movie than recommending this one. A marginal SKIP IT, then.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.