Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Mary J. Blige, Nat Wolf, David Zayas, Anika Noni Rose, David Warshofsky, Ian Casselberry, Philip Fornah, Lara Grice, Demetrius Grosse, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Renell Gibbs, Lorrie Odom, Jeff Pope, Mason Mackie, Jobrail Nantambu, Anil Bajaj, Han Soto, George Wilson, Lance E. Nichols, Sylvia Grace Crim, Emonie Ellison, GiGi Erneta, Maya Goodwin.

Vengeance will be mine, a statement silently vowed by all who suffer the dagger of injustice, who come under fire from their own side, from the bitter blow of being killed by those in uniform who took an oath to protect and serve the community; vengeance may come after the fact, but retribution knows no bounds, it has memory, and it grows, festers, until all who did wrong, answer for it with their own lives.

So the staple of revenge stories will always frame the dead who come back to haunt, to exact a ritual of reprisal that will leave the viewer contemplating a pious life, to do no harm, and perhaps offer a change of heart for those contemplating such an evil deed as murder or manslaughter.

The issue with revenge, especially from beyond the grave, in cinematic terms, is that once you get over the shock of the reason why the spirit is compelled to deal a hand of death in return for what they have suffered, it all boils down to aesthetics, the setting, the joy of the dark, how can the makers just pull that little extra creeping sense of fear by use of illumination rather than pushing the boundaries of the script and narrative.

In the film Body Cam, the viewer is left searching in this proverbial darkness, and whilst the narrative is one that captures the fear and drama that has long been at the heart of the law in America and how disproportionate their use of firearms is against the black community, how the police seem to get away scot-free of murdering innocent men and women, the film also relies too heavily on the scenes being seen in the darkness, of playing too deeply into the arms of cliche.

There are moments in which the heart genuinely pumps a little quicker, where the tension and the resolve do spark conversation, but in the end the narrative doesn’t do the film any favours, and the scene setting overpowers the senses to the point where it gets lost in atmosphere, and not in feeling.

Body Cam could have gone so much further, it could have found itself being the absolute mirror in which our current news items, especially in the United States of America, have touched the raw nerve that needs to expose the systemic racism in the country; in the end the film doesn’t go far enough, it slinks back in it its responsibility and leaves the viewer feeling disjointed and out of synch with what they have witnessed. Average with too few good touches, Body Cam does not capture the essence at hand completely.

Ian D. Hall