While this RZA-directed film could have easily succumbed to the fashionable nihilism of the day, at the heart of Cut Throat City’s undeniable brutality is an activist’s righteous cry for justice, like the Deep South answer to the unforgiving realism of the Hughes Brothers’ Brooklyn-centric cautionary tales from the hood like Menace II Society and Dead Presidents. RZA sets his film in 2005 New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He uses the notoriously inadequate response of FEMA and the Bush administration as a pretext to visualize the tragic human repercussions of the criminal neglect that government agencies showed toward the most vulnerable and poorest parts of New Orleans both during and after the devastating hurricane.
The story centers on four childhood pals who return to their devasted Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood with no money and no hope of finding work in the watery wasteland they’ve come back to. “Blink” (Shameik Moore) is a young, talented Tulane-educated illustrator whose trouble begins when his work is rejected by a snotty middle-class magazine, and then his application for FEMA aid is rejected. Having no choice but to turn to crime to make a living, Blink and his friends fall into the trap the system sets for them—they go to a sadistic local Ninth Ward crimelord "Cousin” (rapper/producer T.I.) for a way to make some bucks, which turns out to be a violent armed robbery of the local casino (they feel justified since the casino got the FEMA relief they should have received).
But the heist doesn’t exactly go as planned, and not only do they get in trouble with Cousin but also the local police department, who begin snooping around and making themselves a nuisance. After a few successful minor robberies, the foursome finally decides to take by force what they feel was rightfully theirs—going directly to FEMA headquarters to let their handguns do the negotiating. Unfortunately for the protagonists, this is where the film begins to resemble an urbanized Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The underlying themes of government-sponsored gentrification and framing the Katrina response as an insidious act of ethnic cleansing on the part of the Bush administration ring true, as does the depiction of the ruthless criminal underworld of New Orleans’s most-deprived district. Apart from its activist leanings, RZA takes the time to generously humanize his characters, whose tragic downfall comes through bad life choices that in the end don’t really seem like choices at all. Highly Recommended.