Overview
In the near future, Frank Grieves is a new breed of police officer working in a city where all recreational drugs are legal. When he is taken off a case involving an unidentified corpse, he discovers that legalization has come at a price.
Narcopolis tells of a city where recreational drugs have been legalised, which has taken the production and sales of these now mainstream drugs out of the mob into the hands of capitalist pharmaceutical corporation Ambro. Aggressively defending its near-monopoly on recreational drugs, the police is beginning to become an extension of the Ambro firm in fighting illegal drugs. Frank Grieves (Elliot Cowan) is one such police officer.
This low-budget Bristisch sci-fi starts out looking pretty good. The director (Justin Trefgarne) managed to find the darkest places of London to make it look suitably dystopian, and the visual effects are very solid. Unfortunately they get a bit overused but that’s not the major gripe. The cinematography is quite good, but after a while the fact that every close up shot is done with the same extreme-depth-of-field trick starts to grate a bit.
The major gripe is that the plot just isn’t very strong. It builds up fairly well and lays out various puzzle pieces for the viewer to play with. But it just seems to continue to be a bunch of subplots and the main arc gets lost. I guess I lost interest half way through as it slowly deteriorates from a sci-fi-mystery-noire into a shoot-and-shout fest…
A disappointed 4/10.
