Monster movie review & film summary (2021)

The debut feature from veteran commercial and music video director Anthony Mandler—whose prolific output includes working frequently with Rihanna, Jay-Z, Drake and the Jonas Brothers, among many other top acts and brands—offers some visual flair, but it’s distractingly clunky and self-aware. Based on the 1999 book of the same name by Walter Dean Myers, “Monster” is simultaneously heavy-handed and inert. It spells out all its messages about the injustices young, black men too often suffer at the hands of police and the court system—an all-too necessary and relevant topic, sadly—yet there’s very little to its characters, rendering their struggle superficial and hollow.

Maybe the first-person narrative structure worked better on the page. In adapting Myers’ Young Adult novel, Radha Blank (the creative powerhouse behind “The 40-Year-Old Version”), Colen Wiley, and Janece Shaffer have maintained the device of having the lead character, a 17-year-old aspiring filmmaker, describe his day as if it were a screenplay, complete with scene headings like: “INT. Courtroom.”

“In the light, during the day, it felt like a movie. This is that movie. My story, written, directed, and starring Steve Harmon,” Harrison says as part of the film’s extensive use of voiceover. Often, we’re forced to hear Steve explain what we can see with our own eyes without offering any sort of insight or sardonic twist. The approach repeatedly draws attention to itself and away from the legitimate drama he’s experiencing.

What Steve’s going through is harrowing, to be sure. He’s a likable, goodhearted and conscientious student at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in New York City with a bright future. All that gets thrown into jeopardy when he’s wrongly accused of being part of a deadly bodega robbery in Harlem. Mandler begins the film with grainy security camera footage of two men storming into the convenience store and killing the clerk before running away. Steve, in the wrong place at the wrong time on the way home from school, gets swept up with the suspects (played by Washington and A$AP Rocky, credited here as Rakim Mayers)—acquaintances from the neighborhood—and charged with felony murder. Witnesses during the trial merely see a bunch of young, black men and are quick to condemn them all.