Exposed is a film suffering from blunt force trauma to the head. Director Gee Malik Linton’s name only remains as screenwriter after his largely Spanish-language film – more meaningfully called Daughter of God and centring on Dominican-New Yorkers – had a helpful supporting role from producer Keanu Reeves greatly expanded by its US distributor, hoping to transform it into a Keanu cop movie. What’s left is a film of two halves, one with Ana de Armas starring and one with Reeves, intercut with a meat cleaver and stumbling with unsteady gait, barely recognisable to each other. This intended thriller has punchdrunk pace, actually slowing to its finish. But it also has fascinating touches of quiet realism and fantasy like little I’ve seen.
It never tops its eerie first scene, as Isabel (de Arnas, pictured below) chats with brother-in-law Rocky (Gabe Vargas) then walks through a hellish subway, and sees a blue-suited, bearded albino, briefcase in hand, step into thin air over the tracks to check their train’s approach, and turn to give an icy smile. These feelings of urban threat then weird wonder are followed by relationship scenes of rare naturalness, showing Isabel at Dominican dinner tables and shyly flirting with her soldier husband in Iraq, and Rocky’s nervy control amongst neighbours working for drug boss Black (Big Daddy Kane), an unremarkable fact of life. De Arnas, meanwhile, continues to see angels of crudely colourful, homemade design, Dominican Catholic icons filling her with wonder, but hiding something worse. This world and its breathing people belong to a better film.
And then there’s Keanu, whose initial well-meaning participation got this whole unlikely project off the ground. A jarring grind of gears switches us into his white cop world. But this movie’s not bad, either. His deeply dirty partner Joey was killed in the same nightmare subway Isabel walked into, with Reeves the sole griever. He’s called a “pathetic” person, disliked by everyone except Joey, and that’s how Reeves plays him, drinking alone in a bar crowded with workmates. Not an actor made for emoting, in middle age he’s now good at this unstated, controlled pain. Long-ago Oscar-winner Mina Sorvino as Joey’s widow is also wound up tight, blowsily frustrated and angry, and sorry for them both. Her relationship with Reeves is unpredictable and convincing. They have sex because they might as well.
Reeves’s intended place outside this story’s centre is shown when a woman shields her daughter’s eyes as he frighteningly beats up her informant dad. He’s the villain here, and Dominican New York stays hostile to him. The white world and the one it polices are impenetrably separate in tone and language, one way this double-narrative works. But the mystical Dominican family drama and the odd cop movie stay unconnected on too many levels. It’s hard to believe Linton’s original version didn’t have its own pacing problems. The compromises weighing down this well-acted, superbly shot hybrid, though, drag it to the floor.
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