Snitch
Summit Entertainment
95 minutes
This may come as a huge shock to you: The movie industry frequently markets their product in dishonest ways in their efforts to make money. For instance, if you watched the trailer or any of the TV spots for the newly released Snitch, you’d think it was just another action movie with cars and guns starring The Rock:
In reality, there’s roughly ten cumulative minutes of killing in the movie. Snitch, directed and co-written by ex-stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, is a family drama about a father (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) who reunites with his estranged son after the kid is thrown in prison due to Draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The dad then does everything he can—including becoming a top informant for a federal prosecutor and the DEA—to get his first-time-offender son’s sentence reduced from ten years to zero. (The AARP has declared that this Dwayne Johnson movie is “really about good parenting.”) Things get even bleaker when his good-natured and once college-bound son starts getting routinely harassed and, as the film implies, raped by the tougher and larger inmates.
Snitch features a lot of somber music and family members, understandably, in tears. It’s hyper critical of the War on Drugs and the real-life mandatory minimum penalties that foster a counterproductive culture of “snitching.” When the promotional materials read that the film is “inspired by true events,” what that means is the script was based on a 1999 episode of PBS’ Frontline titled, “Snitch: How Informants Have Become a Key Part of Prosecutorial Strategy in the Drug War.” The episode examines two cases in which minor offenders got severe sentences based on the testimony of “snitches” who received sentence reductions in return for cooperating with authorities. Unlike the movie, the episode of PBS’ acclaimed investigative news program does not feature a climactic car chase involving a 9mm submachine gun and a big rig.
So just to recap: Dwayne Johnson—a man most famous for pantomime wrestling, acting next to massive explosions, and knowing about the outcome of the Bin Laden raid pretty much before the rest of the world did—just made a movie slamming mandatory minimums that serves as a $35-million companion piece to a PBS documentary.
This is something that happened.
But in all seriousness, Johnson is an adept actor who handles the heavier emotions and grittier sequences here with ease and gravity. And Snitch is The Rock’s best critique of the War on Drugs since the satirical press-conference scene at the beginning of the 2010 Will Ferrell comedy The Other Guys—where New York cops played by The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson heartily defend inflicting $12 million worth of property damage in order to bust criminals carrying only a quarter-pound of weed.
Now check out this clip from the original Frontline documentary “Snitch”:
Watch “It Tore the Whole Family Up” on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
Snitch gets a wide release on Friday, February 22. The film is rated PG-13 for drug content and sequences of violence. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.
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