If You Enjoy Movies Where Black Teenagers Hug Cops, Then You MIGHT Be Able to Tolerate the Abysmal 2018 Nicolas Cage vehicle 211 — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

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Our nation’s racial divide is fierce. The only force on earth powerful enough to overcome it are cinematic depictions of earnest African American teenagers hugging police officers.

The abysmal-even-by-late-period-Nicolas-Cage standards 2018 thriller 211 understands that hugs can be every bit as powerful as an AR-15 assault rifle aimed straight at a kitten’s skull.

Ah, but these interracial, society-healing hugs with cops can’t just happen automatically or spontaneously. No, they need to be earned. The cops need to prove themselves worthy of a big old bear hug by not being racist and terrible and, you know, acting like cops, while the earnest African-American teen has to prove himself worthy of hugging gun-toting instruments of racist oppression.

It’s not unlike the title of N.W.A’s classic single “Hug Tha Police.”

Baby-faced, boyishly handsome Michael Rainey Jr. stars as Kenny Ralston, the earnest African-American teenager who becomes a cop-hugging machine after he and two hero cops end up in a dicey situation together where things like race and power and position cease to seem important and all that matters is survival and hugging.

Poor Kenny begins the film getting ruthlessly bullied by a gaggle of generic white bullies. They shove his head into a toilet but he gets out and at that exact moment an educator opens the door to see Kenny punch the head bully with explosive force.

He runs off in fear and when he’s called to account for his actions he doesn’t pull the whole, “I was being bullied by an aggregation of meanies and only acted out in self-defense” card, which seems like a tactical mistake.

When Kenny’s no-nonsense nurse mother Shawnee (Shari Watson) tells the school that her son was only defending himself against bullies, the principal tells him that he should have gone to a teacher with his concerns. Why, she even came up with quite possibly the most cumbersome, hilariously awkward rhyme in shitty film history to help students remember.

“If a teen’s being mean, to a teacher come clean” is the principal’s wonderfully idiotic homemade aphorism. I was an autistic nerd who got bullied relentlessly in high school but I would feel duty-bound to mock and bully a teacher who delivered those awful, awful, wonderfully terrible words.

The teens were being mean, but to a teacher Kenny did not come clean. He was consequently punished by doing a ride-along with Mike Chandler (Nicolas Cage) and Steve McAvoy (Dwayne Cameron), who is both Mike’s partner AND his son-in-law.

That would be awkward enough if Mike weren’t estranged from his daughter because he abandoned her mother when she died of a fatal illness recently.

Will Mike be able to make it up to his daughter? Will he redeem himself in time for a big old film-closing hug?

Mike and Steve pull the good cop, bad cop routine with Kenny. Steve is the hardass giving the blameless youngster a difficult time for no damn reason at all while Mike is the kindly older gentleman willing to give the kid the benefit of the doubt. When Kenny tells him what he should have told everyone—that he was acting in self-defense against racist bullies—he instantly becomes his friend, ally and defender.

Over the course of the ride-along the police officers stumble across a bank robbery being pulled off by ruthless mercenaries with military-grade weaponry and absolute ruthlessness.

The heist was apparently inspired by the North Hollywood shootout, a legendary 1997 incident in which two insanely armed and armored men robbed a series of banks and had one of the longest and most intense armed confrontations in Los Angeles history.

It sounds like an absolutely apocalyptic affair, with bullets flying everywhere but it comes off as frustratingly if predictably generic here. The bank robbers are an unfortunate combination of bland, boring and interchangeable, which is strange, considering that one is played by Cage’s son Weston.

211 forgets that it’s a heist movie for endless, interminable stretches where it puts the focus intently on what it finds truly interesting: Mike’s suspiciously complicated home life and interracial friendship.

And hugs.

In the not so big shootout Steve, the character played by the less famous and popular actor, gets shot fatally. But before he dies he has Kenny use that crazy cellular telephone he’s so crazy about to challenge him to one final game of Candy Crush.

I kid! In actuality Steve has him record a message to his wife and unborn son that would theoretically be very powerful if the movie were any damned good at all. This isn’t Entourage but before Steve goes to meet the Big Cop in the Sky he hugs it out with his African American friend Kenny.

I’m pretty sure that if this film had been released more widely it would have solved racism.

The heist in 211 feels like a lazy afterthought. 211 doesn’t seem to particularly care about its action scenes, which is not a positive quality in an action movie, even one this small, silly and sad.

Kenny further proves himself by killing a bad guy, earning a big old hug from that softie Mike.

211 closes a year later and now Kenny is part of the family and consequently at the radiant center of family hugs.

There’s something strangely comforting about knowing that Cage continues to churn out these lukewarm piles of cinematic trash alongside the films that have made his comeback, such as Mom and Mad, Mandy, Color Out of Space, Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Staggering Talent and Dream Scenario.

I don’t deal well with change so there’s some weird, masochistic part of me that is relieved that Cage keeps making movies like this even after he got his professional and creative mojo back.