'Emergency' isn't fun and isn't supposed to be
Amazon
Midway through “Emergency,” a white college girl riding a bike comments that her knees are “super bad.” Unless that’s something the kids are saying these days—I don’t think so, but what do I know—the choice of words seems very deliberate.
Not that anyone should miss that in many ways “Emergency” takes the conventions of a raucous, wild-night party movie like “Superbad” and asks, “What if the main characters didn’t have the benefit of white privilege?” The story opens like so many tales of two high school or college dudes (in this case, it’s college) talking about partying and hooking up and so forth. Sean (RJ Cyler of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) is the more gregarious of the two soon-to-be graduates; Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins), a medical student who hasn’t told his best friend yet that he got into Princeton, is more conservative and not quite as psyched about Sean’s determination that tonight they’re going to become the first Black students to complete an epic party itinerary on par with “The World’s End.”
The opportunity for carefree debauchery ends before it really starts, though, when Kunle stops home and discovers an unidentified, very intoxicated white girl passed out on the floor. While he wants to help, Sean insists that it doesn’t matter that they’ve done nothing wrong, only that they are Black and she is white and he doesn’t want to be shot by the police. Their other roommate, Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), was too busy playing video games to even know about the girl lying about 10 feet from his room but gradually becomes an asset as the night unfolds and the trio attempts to balance their concern for a stranger and the awareness that for them calling the authorities is not as easy or innocent as it should be.
The middle section of “Emergency” stalls a bit, struggling to balance the tone of something a little bit drunken and worried/zany in some places (at least in terms of the people looking for the missing girl) and serious/semi-repetitive elsewhere. But the first and third act are incredibly powerful, taking a new approach to important messages we’ve seen in movies like “Queen and Slim” and “The Hate U Give” and crystallizing the recognition of the inherent danger for a person of color in a country that still has so many problems with racism.
The point is not being made to educate white people, though, emphasized in a perfect moment toward the end of the film. The awareness comes from what Sean knows about the world and what Kunle has yet to absorb. It’s a painful, harrowing lesson for any individual, and the society in which they try to live and survive.
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