Producers: Ariel Vromen, Andreas Rommel, Maurice Fadida, Sascha Penn and Adam Kolbrenner   Director: Ariel Vromen   Screenplay: Sascha Penn and Ariel Vromen   Cast: Tyrese Gibson, Ray Liotta, Scott Eastwood, Clé Bennett, Dylan Arnold, Christopher A’mmanuel, Michael Beasley, Ori Pfeffer, Tosin Morohunfola and Oleg Taktarov   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

There’s an identity crisis at the heart of Ariel Vromen’s “1992.”  One part of the film deals with serious issues of racism and family dysfunction.  The other is an almost comically overheated robbery melodrama.  The combination makes for a clumsy brew.

The story is set in Los Angeles toward the close of April, 1992, as a jury is deliberating the fate of the police officers accused of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King the previous year.  On the one hand we’re introduced to Mercer Bey (Tyrese Gibson), an ex-con once prominent in a local gang and now determined to go straight; he has a job as a custodian at factory where catalytic converters are manufactured, thanks to his friend Joseph (Michael Beasley), the head of security there.  Mercer also has custody of his teenaged son Antoine (Christopher A’mmanuel) who lived with his mother and grandmother until both died recently in a car crash.  The boy bristles at having to follow Mercer’s strict rules.

Then there are the Bigbys.  Patriarch Lowell (Ray Liotta) is a hardened criminal specializing in small-time robberies.  His older son Riggin (Scott Eastwood) has been scoping out the converter shop since the devices contain precious metals like platinum.  He and his younger brother Dennis (Dylan Arnold) suggest to Lowell that they rob the place, but he initially turns down the idea, saying that the job is too big and the security too formidable.  His dismissive attitude toward the boys is obvious.

Then on April 29 the verdict acquitting the cops is announced, and the city explodes.  Mercer reacts by going out into the riot-torn streets and finding Antoine before he gets hurt; he’s made arrangements with Joseph to hole up in the factory, whose workers have been sent home for their safety.  The drive there is not uneventful, however: they’re stopped by cops, whose treatment of them infuriates the boy and tests even Mercer’s stoicism.  But they eventually reach the plant.

By that time, however, the Bigby gang is there.  Lowell has decided that the riots provide a perfect cover for a heist, and he, Riggin, Dennis and their crew have made their way there, intending an easy score.  Unfortunately they encounter Joseph and kill him.  And they find that extracting the platinum ingots from the safe in which they’re kept will be a time-consuming process.  When Mercer and Antoine arrive, they find Joseph dead, and try to evade being noticed.  It doesn’t work, of course; as the night goes on, one member of the gang lies seriously injured by a wayward fork lift, Antoine is in the hands of Lowell, and Riggin has been captured by Mercer.  A standoff follows, culminating in a car chase.

This whole last act is staged adequately enough, but the details of the robbery aren’t especially exciting, and Mercer’s means of saving his son and extricating them both from danger not terribly clever.  The scenario does demonstrate the dramatic difference in the attitudes of the two fathers, the one intensely protective and the other relatively uncaring—Lowell seems more interested in ensuring that he get the loot than in seeing to his sons’ survival.  But that’s presented in relatively simplistic terms.

And the background of social strife “1992” seems so concerned with portraying early on has pretty much disappeared.  The riots actually went on for days and the damage was extensive, but as far as the movie is concerned, once Mercer and Antoine are safe, we can stop caring.  It makes the setting little more than a convenient way of explaining why the heist happens as it does, in an empty factory in which both sides have ample time to strategize as the world outside goes to hell in a way we really don’t see.  As such the timing comes across as an exploitative plot device rather than a window into a horrendous historical event, though to be fair a sequence is included to italicize the rioters’ targeting of Korean businesses. 

Otherwise the picture wears its low-budget, gritty look proudly, with John D. Kretschmer’s production design nondescript and Frank G. DeMarco’s camerawork keeping most everything in darkness to hide the location limitations.  Editor Danny Rafic integrates archival footage into the street recreations fairly effectively, but the heist sequences sometimes get sluggish and muddled, while Gilad Benamram’s music is bland. 

The cast, though, almost saves things.  Gibson makes a solid laconic hero, and while Liotta, in what was probably his final role, can hardly be accused of subtlety, he sells Lowell’s mania in his patented fashion.  Eastwood is just okay, but A’mmanuel catches both Antoine’s anger and, in the latter stages, his terror effectively.  The rest of the actors are adequate at best, though Beasley is a nicely avuncular presence.

Vromen, who  coupled with Michael Shannon to pretty good effect in 2012’s “The Iceman” but stumbled badly in the 2016 Ryan Reynolds-Kevin Costner clunker “Criminal,” is trying to have it both ways here, saying something significant about blacks and whites and fathers and sons while going through the paces of a standard-issue heist thriller.  But the two elements don’t gel, and “1992” proves a film whose realization doesn’t measure up to its ambition.