The Stix: Gritty Crime and Consequence in Rural Tennessee

Director: Jaron Lockridge
Cast: Jeff Haltom, Kettrick ‘Jazz’ Copeland, Everett Anderson, Darnail Lanton, Visionz2turnt, Antwon Burchett
Running time: 123 mins
Written and directed by Jaron Lockridge, The Stix is a police procedural-slash-smalltown crime drama that has an almost documentary-like ring of authenticity to it. Given that Lockridge himself is a former police officer who created the story based on real-life events, that verisimilitude isn’t entirely surprising, though you occasionally feel that the dramatic content suffers a little as a result.
The film takes place in present day Mademan County in rural West Tennessee, where police detective Eric Greer (Everett Anderson), his boss Ralph Chew (Jeff Haltom) and partner Jared ‘Ham’ Hamilton (John Dylan Atkins) are engaged in an ongoing struggle to take down local drug kingpin Martell (Darnail Lanton). However, the cops are the least of Martell’s problems, because after several of his drug stashes are raided by masked gangs, he begins to suspect someone in his own crew is getting ready to stage a takeover.
Clearly inspired by TV’s The Wire in both its subject matter and its attempt to take a look at multiple characters on either side of the law, The Stix began life as a zero budget web series that debuted on YouTube in 2018. After the pandemic and various other problems forced the planned second season to fall through, Lockridge decided to remake the first season as a movie.
Consequently, the film’s origins as a web series are both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. On the plus side, the performances are strong (several actors from the series reprise their roles for the movie) and the characters have a lived-in quality to them, particularly Lanton’s world-weary Martell, the stand-out among the cast.
However, Lockridge’s attachment to his source material is all too apparent, because even if you didn’t already know it was based on a web series going in, you’d be able to guess from the sprawling nature of the story and the ultimately unwieldy number of characters. To that end, it could have used both a faster pace and judicious edit, combining certain characters and eliminating others altogether.
There are a number of highlights – such as the cops taunting Martell by casually telling him about the enormous amount of money they recently found in a drug house that definitely didn’t belong to him – and the script pulls off an unexpected twist that works well, though it could have used a little more humour overall.
Verdict
In fairness, considering the extremely low budget, the film stands as quite the achievement, with the realistic dialogue adding considerably to the film’s documentary-like quality and the real-life locations adding an extra level of authenticity. However, the cheapness of the whole thing is occasionally distracting, whether it’s in the temp-sounding score or the poor quality sound effects in the gunshot scenes.
In short, this is something of a mixed bag. The characters are strong and there’s an impressive sense of place, but the story drags considerably, bogged down by the surfeit of characters and ultimately lacking in either dramatic incident or emotional connection.
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