Jazz musicians, and heroin addicts: Spoon and Stretch decide to get clean after their friend and bandmate Cookie overdoses when she tries heroin for the first time. Their efforts are hampered by seemingly endless red tape, as they are shuffled from one office to another while being chased by drug dealers and the police.
Written and directed by actor Vondie Curtis Hall, the film blends savvy and sour-mash humor with bone-deep sadness that recalls predecessors as varied as After Hours and Trainspotting.
The film has a fairly uninteresting narrative motor in its thriller subplot, but hits on an edgy black comic tone for Stretch and Spoon's increasingly pained dealings with the unsympathetic representatives of authority.
This is grim material, but surprisingly entertaining, and it is more cause to mourn the recent death of Shakur, who gives his best performance as Spoon, a musician who wants to get off drugs.
The late Shakur is especially impressive as the brighter of the duo -- a frazzled but infinitely patient character with a touching faith that somehow, if the pair just keeps plugging away, everything will turn out okay.
The movie's appeal lies largely in its capacity for surprise, riffing off tired characters and pooped genres to produce, intermittently at least, a fresh new tone. Call it junkie humour.
Cast against type as the gentler of two musician junkies trying to burrow through the bureaucracy to enter a rehab clinic in Detroit, Shakur has the relaxed screen presence of a young Wesley Snipes and plays perfectly off the delirious Tim Roth.
An engaging look at a mangy day in the lives of two junkies trying to kick, Gridlock'd would have been a good mid-level B.O. performer even without the interest surrounding it, due to the recent death of co-star Tupac Shakur.
Gallery of "Gridlockd"
HD
Annabelle: Creation
2017
IMDb: 7
109 min
Country: United States
Genre: Thriller, Horror, Mystery
Twelve years after the tragic death of their little girl, a dollmaker and his wife welcome a
nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into ...
