A hotbed of police brutality, anti-policeman aggression, inveterate racism and mob violence, a fictional Danish ghetto area entraps two white policemen in Danish filmmakers Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders ?lholm’s debut feature, ENFORCEMENT, whose original title SHORTA is an Arabic term for “police”.

Entering Venice Film Festival’s International Critics' Week sidebar, the film opens with a disquieting scene that presciently anticipates the George Floyd murder, a Muslim youngster is under duress by policemen and exclaiming “I can’t breathe!”. In the wake of this incendiary incident, with the said youngster is on life support, the Muslim neighborhood cries foul and bays for blood, and at that critical point, a pair of policemen Mike Andersen (Lohmann) and Jens H?yer (Sears) patrols in the sink area, when the animosity aggravates, they have to fight their way out of the hell-scape, but to what consequences?

The good-cop-bad-cop set-up is familiar, Mike is an out-and-out macho racist, hard-bitten, cynical and aggressive, while Jens is younger, leaner and compassionate, a level-headed guy whom you can count on. Their internecine smackdown is what’s in the cards, but after that, Hviid and ?lholm’s script foregrounds Mike’s change of viewpoint when he is stranded in a housing project, where he is saved by a Muslim nurse Abia (Saglanmak), who happens to be the mother of Amos (Zayat), the young Muslim he apprehends. So Mike is designed to find out Amos is not a tearaway but a talented footballer who cannot make it because of his race, and when two young Muslim kids coming to his rescue, what haunts your head is a wishful thinking: don’t let anything happen to the two good kids.

ENFORCEMENT falls by the wayside when the good cop Jens is subjected to a fatal mistake, so as to pull through the about-face plot device and obscure the two cops' apparent discrepancy. Only the director-duo’s tactic has no flair, it is leaden and arbitrary (like the coincidence-and-inexplicability-riddled plot), and a deal-breaking failing is that Muslims are treated as black-or-white ciphers (the radical rascals versus the good-hearted innocents), Hviid and ?lholm fails to fashion anything even remotely intelligent from the Muslim’s point of view, exactly because of their own white privilege, this is their blind spot. The film may sound and look like an inspiring story against racism, but it is tired and jaundiced, pandering to white Danes and not doing right by the ethnic group. Again, diversity should be enforced within every and each position of the business, otherwise, it is plain tokenism.

On the plus side, Hviid and ?lholm cut their teeth in concocting an arresting thriller with some style and gore (although the city-sprawling pandemonium is only glimpsed from afar or heard from the news channel), and Lohmann is rabid enough to make Mike repugnant and then kits himself up with a changed impression that isn’t feel far-fetched, yet Sears has far more screen charisma to leave you engrossing, unfortunately, his Jens starts as a hero (light literally refracting upon his head when he banters with Amos), but exits as a whimpering enigma, the comedown is dispiriting.

referential entries: Nicolo Donato’s BROTHERHOOD (2009, 7.8/10); Mathieu Kassovitz’s LA HAINE (1995, 7.5/10).

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