A while back I got a Netflix subscription to watch the Canelo vs Crawford fight. Since then, I hadnāt used the subscription to watch a lot of movies but Iāve been forcing myself to find things that I might like on the platform since Iām paying for it.
I came across a movie with Idris Elba in a cowboy hat called Concrete Cowboy, and since the last movie I saw with him playing a outlaw cowboy ended up being one of my favorite movies of all time I figured this movie would be pretty good too.
(If you havenāt seen The Harder They Fall, I highly recommend you go watch that!)
What I ended up getting was a solid father son drama, with a good bit of black history sprinkled into it.
Watching Concrete Cowboy felt like a mix between the show Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and the movies Precious, South Central, and Juice. A mother sends her son to stay with his father for a summer after the son getting into some trouble at school to help give him some morals, and the son lands in Philly with his father who runs horse stable.
Yes! A horse stable in the middle of Philadelphia in 2020. Sounds crazy but itās something that really takes place out there.
The movie follows the young man coming into his own while being developed by the structure his father has in place, the work he has to do in the stable while living with his father, and navigating Philadelphia street life as a young man.
The movies has some of those old black pain tropes of young black men being involved in the drug trade and the violence that comes along with that, which seem pretty played out in my opinion. But it also shows love, hard work, structure, and pieces of black history and culture that isnāt talked about to often.
The only other movie I can recall that mentioned the history of black cowboys was NOPE, which is another good/ underrated movie in my opinion.
The movie is casted in a really cool way as well. They have some failure faces that you see in other movies like Idris Elba, Method Man, and Lorraine Toussaint. But they also have people who are real cowboys and cowgirls from the Philly, which allows them to tell their story in a really cool way.
Respect to the director for thatā¦
The challenges that the main character goes through a long with all of the side plots come together to make a nice solid movie. Itās been a while since Iāve seen a good drama like this but I think they did a good job giving us a good emotional story, culture, and history all in one film.
If youāre a fan of drama in film, Iād defiantly recommend watching Concrete Cowboy if you hadnāt seen it already. I feel like it isnāt over the top in its approach and has a little something for everyone. Overall, I rate the movie Concrete Cowboy
8.1/10
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