Comedic intentions while attempting to make a statement appear to be unbalanced
Everything about College is challenging and nerve wracking, such as the grueling coursework and a plethora of hazing traditions and social integration attempts. For the student characters of this new film, there are more than academic and social concerns of college life when they discover an underage drunk white woman who has passed out in their lounge room. This is Sans the context of this film: How do college students find an innocent, drunken girl in their Australian apartment, if at all, and why do they bother bringing the girl home? It’s always so much easier to call the police and leave it all to the professionals.
For Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) the straight A med student, and his two pals Sean (RJ Cyler) and Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), the idea of even calling the cops is a bit of a conundrum because of their race. Will they be framed in spite of their innocence? This is what they ruminate on and who can blame them. Because as we know, the police do have questionable practices in regard to the Black race.
What are they supposed to attack? One suggestion makes the boys who are with the girl in an unconscious state throw her outside a nearby frat party assuming that this is where she came from. If this was done however, there is a great chance their actions can be filmed by mobile devices. Another suggestion is that they bring her to a hospital, but they think that would be likely problematic as well since people would think they did something wrong to her even if they never did.
Good intentions would have the boys carrying out what needs to be done without thinking twice. However, owing to the fact that they have been brought up in a racially sensitive environment, the answer to the question is complicated. In the end, they do decide to take her to the hospital. However, as is usual, things go from bad to worse after they place her into their vehicle and proceed their strategy of bringing her back alive.
While this is primarily a feature length version of a 2018 short, it falls into the category of being both a satire and a racial drama which reincorporates the comical elements that can be found throughout the film. Boys act out some pretty savage one liners while talking to each other and there is plenty of laughs to be had about some of the boys’ dilemmas. It also seems to lessen some of the more worrying points of the plot, such as the real fear that students have of being gunned down and shot in case the law enforcement comes to them.
Even though the focus of the film remains on Kunle and his pals, we are also introduced to the character of Maddie (Sabrina Carpenter), who is the sister of the one girl who has drunk a bit too much. She embarks on her own quest, to find her sister by using the tracking app on her phone and predictably, she soon comes across the unfortunate boys who are desperately trying to solve their problems. She naturally goes on the offense a la a sister, which hilariously doesn’t go according to plan.
The film at its core belongs to a surrealist genre in which a person experiences clenched paranoia and one scene later, irrepressible laughter. Such cockeyed images are no stranger to the audiences and as a matter of fact, 2018 once released the movie Blindspotting that successfully combined humour with racial discourses, but in the case of Emergency, such blending of genres appears to have failed.
This could be as a result of the screenplay which hurries our protagonists from one scene to another leaving little time, for us to appreciate either the humor or the horror of the situation, Or it could be of because the light hearted students’ antics appear to be misplaced in what we expect to be a social satire rather than a super-bad type of comedy.
With that said, however, quite a lot can still be appreciated. For one, some of the gags are laugh out loud funny and the trio at the heart of the film is quite entertaining. The three perfectly complement each other even though they are different and the actors playing those roles do quite well in bringing out the quirks of all their characters.
Also, the film manages to engage us into the panic of the boys. We may be of different skin colour, but still, knowing how life can be dangerous for the black people in such situations with the police is a given. We feel sorry to think that such a law-abiding individual is too paranoid about the law even before they come into contact with it. It’s even more unfortunate to appreciate that this is the reality for many people who have been shaped under the ignorant biases within the justice system.
So many things are happening in Emergency so one can be thankful for the fact there is so much comedy to alleviate the stress. There is so much drama in life, but there is just as much comedy, or so the saying goes, and perhaps this is the thesis that director Carey Williams is attempting to express with his feature. It’s a long film and the structure is not as good, but if you can look past the comedy, then this is still a pretty good film for the message it carries.
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