1992

Fathers and sons, eh? There’s nothing simple about raising boys, especially among the dead lawns and razor wire of Crenshaw, and especially on April 29, 1992, the day the L.A. riots kicked off. 1992 takes all that intriguing dynamic and uses it as set dressing for a generic grimy heist flick.

All the fathers here are seemingly committed and loyal, but don’t exactly have clean hands. Mercer (Gibson) has recently been awarded custody of his teenage son (Ammanuel), who resents his formerly deadbeat dad even as he tries to be a role model. Yet in the street he’s an ex-con known as Merc, an OG legend whose mere name is enough to make stripling gangbangers soil their baggy jeans. But he’s not the only daddy with a rap sheet around, because there are two generations of crooks across town: old-school breaking-and-entering guy Lowell Bigby (Liotta, in one of his last roles) and his sons, the big-dreaming Riggin (Eastwood) and the nervous Dennis (Arnold). The families clash when the Bigby clan use the cover of the riots to rob a catalytic converter factory – where Mercer happens to work – just as L.A. is going into meltdown.

Israeli director Ariel Vromen has spent the last decade or so churning out immemorable crime flicks. You know the kind: Redbox filler with a few recognizable character actors in the cast, none of whom are going to highlight those films on their résumé. (Seriously, has anyone ever gone, “Kevin Costner? Oh, the guy from Criminal!”) Reuniting with Liotta (who he first worked with on the equally forgettable hitman drama The Iceman), Vromen takes the era-defining court case – which acquitted four LAPD officers of using excessive force in the beating and arrest of Rodney King, all caught on camera – and turns it into set dressing. Honestly, it could have been any distraction that facilitates the heist, and it’s hard to feel that there’s a good reason to set 1992 in 1992.

Vromen does make some efforts at re-creating the period. But what links 1992 to the era is that it feels like part of that wave of low-budget late-Nineties Heat knockoffs, all featuring a cast that can do better but hey, a paycheck is a paycheck. 1992 is just Hard Rain with the riots standing in for a storm.

That film was a career low mark for both Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater, but you can’t quite make that claim for anyone involved in 1992. There are traces of something smarter in here, as Mercer – who lived through the Watts Rebellion – is old enough to predict what this cycle of injustice and indifference looks like. Maybe those elements survive from the original script by Creed II writer Sascha Penn, which has been floating around Hollywood for a decade.