Five movies make up Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, and so far two have focused on the treatment of London’s Black communities by the capital’s Metropolitan Police. But whereas Mangrove exposes the Force’s institutional racism from the outside through the 1970 trial of nine Black protesters, Red, White And Blue delivers an awe-inspiring internal perspective via John Boyega’s young police officer, Leroy Logan.
Boyega is no stranger to playing real-life people confronted with police brutality that reeks of racism. He portrayed security guard Melvin Dismukes in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2017 Detroit, set during the 1967 race riots, but while he shone as part of an ensemble, in McQueen’s film, co-written by Courttia Newland, he blazes.
Boyega is magnetic. He delivers as much passion, intelligence and heart as he did through a megaphone at the BLM protest.
The thrum of injustice permeates throughout 1980s London — created by production designer Helen Scott and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner — from Logan as a young boy being stopped and searched outside his school, to the vicious beating his father Kenneth (Steve Toussaint) receives from two racist boys in blue. As with most Black households of the 1980s, there is no love lost for the police, but Logan is a testament to the first-generation Jamaican immigrant parents who raised him, and he wants to set a new standard. Brought up to be smarter, fitter and “more British” than his white British peers, Logan uses his academic success to become a research scientist, but after witnessing the continued violence against his community, he decides to become a police officer to challenge prejudice from within the force.
This, of course, puts him at odds with his father, whose quiet battle to get his day in court is juxtaposed with the gritty intensity of Logan’s police training. As he strives for equality in an institution that breeds hate against people with brown and Black skin, he carries the vitrolic weight of members of his own community who see him as a traitor to his race by wearing a police uniform.
Boyega is magnetic. He delivers as much passion, intelligence and heart as he did through a megaphone at the Black Lives Matter protest in London. He navigates the double consciousness of Logan’s simmering emotions as he switches between dialects to correspond with the impression he wants to make. Toussaint, too, balances quivering rage with subtle vulnerability. But there is so much tension in what is not said between father and son, officer and commander, white man and Black man, that paints a visceral picture of the Black-British experience, Black masculinity, and a society still living with the hangover of colonial prejudice.
Red, White And Blue is a cinematic mirror brilliantly designed to reflect the racial injustice of London’s past — but no matter how harrowing the film gets, you will not want to look away.
