Shooting Heroin review (2020)

Shooting Heroin is clearly a labor of love with all the best intentions. The messaging is clear and heartfelt, but it’s lacking in some critical elements that hold it back from being a compelling watch. It’s mainly a hodgepodge of potentially interesting ideas that never come to fruition with the exception of a solid final act.

Maybe it would have helped if director/writer Spencer T. Folmar (Saint Nick of Bethlehem) decided if he want to take this anti-drug film to a full-on vigilante direction? Or simply avoid having his main characters spin their wheels in thinking their efforts to stop their town from being further victimized by heroin was making a difference?

Shooting Heroin doesn’t offer much by way of addressing those questions though a more vigilante-focused effort probably would have been more exciting.

Adam (Alan Powell) gets the call that his former heroin addict sister is back in the hospital. It’s for a legit reason, but the morphine painkillers she’s given send her spiraling back to get another fix ultimately leading to her death. With his shaky family unit led by his mother (Cathy Moriarty, Saint Nick of Bethlehem), Adam doesn’t get a lot of comfort or solace.

Hazel (Sherilyn Fenn) can relate to an overall lack of satisfaction and results with the opioid epidemic in their rural Pennsylvania town. She lost her two sons due to them shooting heroin and now she speaks to high school students trying to offer a face for the grief and loss of loved ones left behind.

Edward (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) is also frustrated by the lack of meaningful police work done to bring to justice the drug dealers causing all of the grief and despair. As a prison guard, Edward sees people behind bars for far less troubling actions than preying on addicts and providing them the means to kill themselves.

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After seeing more headlines of more frustrating inactivity to stop the source of the heroin issues, the trio seek action. They talk to police officer Jerry (Garry Pastore), who gives them a measure of authority as a citizen task force to make whatever dent they can in curbing the flow of drugs into their town.

This isn’t a terrible premise from Folmar, but he fails to figure out the best approach. Shooting Heroin really feels like a taking matters into their own hands kind of vigilante fantasy movie. The kind that couldn’t work in the real world yet provides some measure of cathartic release for those who wish there was a bad guy to take down for loved ones fighting/loss their battle to addiction.

Folmar seems to have commendable self-awareness that he wasn’t experienced enough as a filmmaker to handle a shoot-out heavy action film in a barebones budget. Naturally, this is preferrable to vainly failing on all fronts. This doesn’t mean Shooting Heroin is a smooth viewing experience. Transitions are rough with abrupt editing cuts and curious camera angle perspectives.

The performances are equally rough with the cast particularly Fenn and Powell overacting seemingly as a means to convey their characters’ emotions more convincingly. Instead, it’s got the opposite result with them making Adam and Hazel come off far less authentic in this serious subject matter. Nicholas Turturro is decent as the pastor trying to lower the simmering town sentiment that someone needs to take down the drug dealers by any means necessary.

Folmar doesn’t properly address the matter of why Officer Jerry can’t at least do some token arrests to quell the brewing mob down. At least taking down the lowest level of drug dealers would be a show of good faith that he’s trying to make a dent in the drug activity.

Instead, Adam, Hazel and Edward seem to do more in a 10- to 15-minute span of confronting some bad actors in the town even down to the doctors and pharmacists who sign off on the large amounts of prescriptions that start patients down a more dangerous path.

The quasi-vigilante path doesn’t work out well for Adam, who comes this close to being arrested after being too aggressive in going after a drug dealer at the high school. When another tragic death occurs, the town is divided by Adam’s more vigilante-revenge seeking crew and those in favor of Hazel’s more peaceful methods.

There are some pretty clever developments in the final act that pay off some of the subplots in a meaningful way. For all of Folmar’s good intentions, Shooting Heroin doesn’t fully connect on its earnest messaging.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Photo Credit: Veritas

Shooting Heroin is available to watch on Amazon Prime.

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