1992

Directed by Ariel Vromen ◆ Written by Sascha Penn and Ariel Vromen ◆ Produced by Kodiak Pictures, Death Row Pictures, et al. ◆ Distributed by Lionsgate Films

“I did the best I can, son. I’m sorry it wasn’t enough,” goes the self-pitying, guilt trip-laying cliché of failed Boomer fathers across America. Inserting this grating line in the Israeli director Ariel Vromen’s underwhelming new film 1992, which premiered on Aug. 30 to disappointing sales in a mercifully limited cinema release, would have been insipid had it not been delivered by the late actor Ray Liotta. Liotta, best known for his role as gangster Henry Hill in Goodfellas (1990), has been dead for more than two years but, through some miracle of interrupted filming, completed all of his scenes before his death at the age of 65 in May 2022.

The sheer incongruity of a dead celebrity actor appearing in a new release added at least a hint of fascination to this otherwise formulaic heist picture, produced by rap artist and media personality Snoop Dogg (stage name of Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.), which is curiously set against the background of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. 

Now a distant memory after the nationwide race riots following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the Los Angeles disturbances of 32 years ago were confined to that city for one six-day period. Blacks, angered by the acquittal of four white police officers videotaped in the apparent act of beating the black motorist Rodney King, violently protested in their own neighborhood and in Los Angeles’s nearby Koreatown. (A year later, two of the policemen were convicted on federal charges of violating King’s civil rights and sentenced to 30-month prison terms).

The LA riots killed 63 people—the single largest number of whom were themselves black—and caused as much as $1 billion in damage. They were also the last occasion when a U.S. president—then George H. W. Bush—invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy military units to restore order.

Given the racial turmoil of the past few years, one might expect Vromen’s film to make some devastating comment about race relations in America or its allegedly racist policing, which remains topical and was the proximate cause of the Los Angeles riots. While it features an obligatory racist traffic stop and casts white people as the plot’s “real criminals,” the film was conceived nearly a decade ago, before DEI got an obvious stranglehold over our institutions. This was before our country was burdened with tendentious tales of racial iniquity, institutionalized reverse racism, a pernicious two-tier approach to law enforcement heavily inflected by considerations of racial “social justice,” and the merit-free rise of Kamala Harris. 

Even as the nation’s current racial obsessions started to sprout in 2015, when the film was initially conceived, they were not yet important enough to suffuse Vromen’s more central, if hackneyed, themes of fathers and sons, and the often fertile encounter of basic human greed with sudden opportunity. Indeed, the Los Angeles riots play such an incidental role in the film that its original title, “April 29, 1992”—historically the first day of the riots—was eventually shorn of its month and date to place the action simply in its year, like a prequel season of the television drama Yellowstone.

The plot is simple but holds together poorly and is too filled with coincidences to command belief. Mercer, a black gang member who has just been released from prison, seeks to prevent his teenage son Antoine from making the same mistakes in life. Antoine feels little for his father because of his recent absence and resists his overtures. As the King verdict is announced and the riots begin, Mercer is dismayed when he finds Antoine joining in the mayhem by smashing a shop window.

Mercer and his son to find refuge in Mercer’s workplace, a factory that manufactures catalytic converters, which at that time included platinum (today palladium is apparently the element of choice). As the riots distract law enforcement, the factory’s platinum supply becomes the target of a family of white criminals led by Ray Liotta’s character Lowell, a temperamental man who has vaguely similar relational issues with his sons Dennis and Riggin, two oafs played by Dylan Arnold and Clint Eastwood’s vastly less-talented illegitimate son Scott.

Like any MacGuffin device, we never quite learn what motivates the criminals to seek it, apart from their belief its illicit sale will yield them the surprisingly round figure of $10 million. This is an amount they revere almost in the spoofed Bond villain way that Austin Powers’s nemesis Dr. Evil ridiculously contemplates blackmailing the United Nations for (“one milllliiion dollars!”). Lowell and sons want it badly enough to kill a black security guard at the plant in a classic quickdraw gunplay scene borrowed from Spaghetti Westerns, and to take Mercer and Antoine captive when they get in the way. 

If there is a racial message here, it is that whites—even if they have the same familial problems—are covetous and immoral, especially when juxtaposed with blacks, who are now almost invariably depicted, in this film and elsewhere, as fundamentally good, albeit with character flaws, and possessed of a strong propensity to noble self-sacrifice. From that point on, the film degenerates into a workmanlike 1990s criminal standoff movie, reminiscent of Joel Schumacher’s somewhat better Falling Down (1993) and Jan de Bont’s equally bad Speed (1994), with banal lines to match. “You’re at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Lowell almost comically tells Antoine at gunpoint, in a scene so silly that the young Gen Z actor Christopher Ammanuel, playing Antoine, seems to have a hard time keeping a straight face.

If the film has a star, it is less Liotta, whose last film role this was, than the R&B singer Tyrese Gibson, playing Mercer, who has effected a fairly successful midlife career transition to the silver screen (he plays a recurring role in the Fast & Furious series, among other recent credits). Hailing from Los Angeles’s Watts section—the site of race riots that broke out in 1965, some years before Gibson’s birth—he boasts personal experience of 1990s gang violence that he channeled into the role. His scenes trying to keep Ammanuel’s juvenile Antoine on the straight and narrow are among the film’s most affecting. 

At the risk of sounding blasé, without the historic news reports playing on the film’s early 1990s-vintage analog television sets, the riots as depicted could be any urban disturbance in an America where commercial heists and mob looting are now commonplace and rarely result in arrest, prosecution, and still less, any trace of potentially career-ending police brutality. Indeed, a majority of the film was shot in, of all places, Bulgaria, whose post-Communist industrial grit is a not totally unconvincing substitute for a Southern California “hood.” Given some current theories of criminal justice, the combination might not be accidental.