‘Charm City Kings’ Review: Bike stunts, spectacular acting in Meek Mill’s film debut let down by cliched story
Veering crazily, like the dirt bikes on view, between the cliched and the heartfelt, the film is a mixed bag. With strong performances out of the gate, especially it's lead Jahi Di'Allo Winston, who plays Mouse, it is an engrossing watch.
Add to this, there are some incredible shots of riders who defy gravity and everything holding them down. As Mouse tells the girl he is trying to impress, "The Ride", which is an informal summer event where riders show off to crowds on a Sunday, is "like the ocean".
There is poetry in those wheelies. There is precision, and discipline that the riders show -- clawing back control in their lives. But the film reduces them to mere props of the 'wrong crowd' in a cliched morality play that relies heavily on past onscreen representations of Baltimore, like 'The Wire', to fill in the narrative gaps.
Mouse and his two friends Lamont (Donielle T. Hansley Jr.) and Swear-ta-gawdh (Kezii Curtis) are innocent teens, between the ages of 13 and 14. They squabble, banter, and dream about dirt bikes. Mouse, in particular, is obsessed with bikes, because his 'hero' was his older brother, Stro, who was a top rider before his tragic death. Mouse wants to live up to his brother's legacy, despite being forbidden by his mother Terri (Teyonah Parris) from riding. So, he approaches his brother's erstwhile gang, Midnight Clique.
He starts off by apprenticing as a mechanic with Blax (Meek Mill), an ex-con, who is staying out of the gang's illegal activities but runs their bike garage. His 'Miyagi-type' mentorship is celebrated by Mouse, who looks forward to building his own cool bike someday. In contrast, he pushes away the worries of his mother and his school-program mentor, Detective Rivers (Will Catlett), who want him to go to the "good job", at the veterinarian clinic. Up till this point, the film feels authentic and nicely paced though we don't quite get why being a mechanic is worse than being a vet.
Then the film shifts after a contrived plot driver -- Mouse finds his mom crying over several 'final notice' bills. When Mouse tells Blax he wants money instead of a bike for the work he is doing, Blax refuses. So he decides to start doing 'work' for the gang, making illegal package drops and pickups for the easy money.
When Terri discovers his cash stash, she throws him out of the house. The 'final notice' bills are never mentioned again and we never know how Terri pays them off, especially since she doesn't take Mouse's money. Within the script, they only appear as a ruse to tempt Mouse to the dark side.
Soon Mouse, wanting to be taken seriously as an adult, suddenly decides to rob the grocery store around the corner with his friends (where they hang all the time) because they know the owners and the store well. This sudden escalation just doesn't make sense and their innocence, which is played up in earlier scenes, clashes with how cold-bloodedly they decide to rob people they know and interact with every day.
Even more baffling is how the normally chill Lamont bashes a man's face in with a brick after the man steals a bike from Mouse. This is why he, Mouse and Swear-ta-gawdh are recruited by the Midnight Clique, impressed by Lamont's savagery. Again, Lamont is not shown to be an angry kid before this -- there is nothing to indicate that he is hiding that level of anger and aggression within him.
Similarly, Blax and Detective Rivers are not well-fleshed out. That someone like Mouse, in a single mother family, would attract two such formidable and caring male father figures where hood boys often find it difficult to find even one, is unlikely. And yet, Mouse is portrayed as someone who is automatically special and worthy of second chances because he is the lead -- he definitely gets more breaks than Lamont or Swear-ta-gawdh.
Blax and Detective Rivers are reduced to symbolic figures representing Mouse's choices rather than actual characters. In the end, Mouse rejects the biking culture and goes to vet school, leaving the charms of the streets behind.
His "second chance" is thanks to a poignant twist right at the end, that elevates Blax from a mere ex-con to something more substantial, but aside from that the script depends on too many cliches, saved only by the performance of its actors.
'Charm City Kings' premiered on HBO Max on October 8.