While watching this movie, one can almost hear the voices of small plane pilots, engineers, physicists, macgyvers, um, people—saying nope, not possible, wouldn't work, no way— as each worsening episode unfolds. But that's kind of the nature of these tales. As this one goes, it's just okay.

This is not a film about the '67 Detroit riots in the usual mode of socio-historical dramas---it is actually a grueling police-brutality horror movie staged within the setting of those riots. Which is to say that it is about the deeper causes of this, and other, American urban upheavals. But don't expect pleasant viewing---this film is by turns meticulous and gratuitous in its depiction of human cruelty.