Body Cam stars Mary J Blige as a cop investigating a series of unusual murders. Only she can see the body cam footage. Who or what is committing these murders? Many of the victims are cops. Will she be next? I was attracted to the movie because of the promise of found footage horror, which is one of my many favorite guilty pleasures and weaknesses.
I am still one of the ancients who subscribes to Netflix DVDs, but I can only choose three. There were six new releases coming out on November 17th. Instead of choosing Unhinged, The New Mutants or Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, the latest Werner Herzog film, I chose Body Cam, which turns out to be streaming on Amazon Prime at no additional cost. I would regret it if I saw it on any platform, but I am extra salty for passing up other movies for this one. I thought that I checked.
I grade on a curve when it comes to horror, especially if there are found footage elements so if I did not like this movie, please trust me. I am an extremely generous viewer and am rooting for the film. Do not follow my lead. Do not watch Body Cam. It is not worth it. There may be around a hot fifteen minutes of goodness, but by then I did not care.
Body Cam’s story is a series of tropes that people poorly strung together because they do not understand what made the tropes originally work and become tropes in the first place. It is not enough that we have a black woman cop, but she is also a wife and mourning mother, which would be a nice way to flesh out her character if those traits were not thrown out there as a substitute for character development. She has a young partner who doesn’t drink, then drinks a lot, then doubts/gaslights her then trusts her. He is completely forgettable except for when he is briefly me and nopes out of an investigation when he has an encounter in which he would prefer to be shot over what he experienced. It is the most hilarious part of the film. There are a couple of well-known actors whom viewers may vaguely recognize and immediately peg as shady in spite of their superficial warmth. There is a mysterious woman in a van so we can actually get something going.
I keep hearing that Blige is an amazing actor after her performance in Outbound, which I started, but need to return to, but I could not tell from watching Body Cam. She does get the best line in the movie when she spits, “I am a cop, bitch!” It is the most emotion that she is permitted to show in the entire film. Everyone in this movie is so wooden even the old pros except Anika Noni Rose when she finally gets to speak lines during the denouement. If she was the main character, maybe she could cobble together enough excellent performances with mediocre actors to keep viewers invested in watching the movie, but it is too little, too late. I do not want to blame Blige or any of the actors because the story is such a mess with zero organic momentum that each actor would have to be Sisyphus to help us.
Body Cam initially comes across as if Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn thought up this movie. The cops are the victims, and the only characters depicted, however poorly, as real people with personal lives—kids, spouses, feelings other than anger. The citizens that they are supposed to protect are irrationally angry at them, innately suspicious and/or highly negligent. Because the film does such a poor job creating characters, these cops are mostly indistinguishable fodder for the killer. It is the kind of cowardly movie that spends so much time trying to garner favor before swiping complete storylines from Strange Days and doing a complete one-eighty. By the time it gets there, you are not rooting for anyone with this lackluster, completely predictable plot twist.
Remember Body Cam is supposed to be a horror movie. Ask yourself if the cause of the unusual murders is supernatural, scientific or crazy people? A scientific movie would have at least been original and done a better job explaining the phenomenon such as cockroaches in a single location and not everywhere in a home and modus operandi of the killer-lifting people up, teeth everywhere, disturbance in electrical equipment—than the explanation that the movie provides. Aliens should have been intervening as a kind of intergalactic peacekeeping troop protecting human beings that they saw as victims. Instead we get a shadowy figure that bears no resemblance to its origin except for the bit with the plastic bag. Most horror movies that fail can at least boast of atmosphere, but not this one. The denouement is decent. A scene in a convenience store is passable, but barely. I have seen better shorts set in such locations. The best moment is in the house when a hand suddenly emerges from…..I won’t give it away.
It does not help that Body Cam uses the overly used How We Got Here Trope by starting with the first murder and showing us clearly what happened before backtracking to just twelve hours earlier when soon thereafter Blige’s character will see the grainy footage thus draining any possible suspense the movie could have had. Whenever a movie begins that way, I realize that I made a mistake, and if I was not a completist, I would immediately eject the movie and run the other way. I swear that the partner exists just so we could have multiple prose dumps. This story is so clumsily told. If I had to choose one thing to be angry about, it would be that we never get to see Blige’s character’s infamous excessive force moment. That moment could have opened a door into intersectionality—why certain cops get protected while doing the most and other cops get reprimanded for far less or doing good. It felt more like an issue with Blige’s character being a woman rather than being black, but the movie completely misses making any germane broader points about race and gender. It is an utter failure.
By the way, Body Cam unfolds in Louisiana, and some reviewers thought it was Los Angeles, but I am not going to blame the reviewer. If you are filming in New Orleans, it should be so visually distinct and impressive like Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger, The Last Exorcism franchise, which I loved, or Bad Lieutenant! This film does not even make a cliché reference to voodoo, which could have helped the movie move forward. Yeah, no.
Instead of seeing Body Cam, watch Black and Blue, Clemency, Strange Days, Candyman, Alien Abduction, Marvel One-Shot: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Thor’s Hammer and any other movie that I referenced. Combined these movies will give you most of the emotional beats that this movie tried and failed to evoke. I beg of you please do not see this film.
