Sean Penn is considered one of the best actors of his generation.  He’s won two Academy Awards for Best Actor for Mystic River and Milk. Since the 2000s, he hasn’t been as prolific of an actor. He’s been doing more humanitarian work than making movies. He’s done the occasional film here or there, but not that many in recent years. His latest is called Asphalt City about a pair of ambulance paramedics in New York City.

Ollie Ross (Tye Sheridan, Ready Player One) is a young man from Colorado who has come to New York City to be a paramedic for the New York City Fire Department. He is teamed up with a grizzled 15-year veteran, Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn). He takes the younger man under his wing. Even under these somewhat good circumstances, things go bad for the pair. Sheridan’s Ross has a lot of growing up to do in this world; he is so new, too.

Director Jean Stéphane Sauvaire puts these characters into many difficult situations.  Some of them include drugged-up pregnant women, gunshot wounds, and dog bites, to name just a few. This film is raw, very bloody, violent, graphic, and sad. It takes place in some strange and weird locations like kitchens, bathrooms, and smoke-filled buildings.  All the places and things you’d think paramedics in New York City would run into. This film showed me a world I didn’t expect when I started watching the film.

Sheridan is a younger actor who’s been doing solid work since the early 2010s. He has been in Mud opposite Matthew McConaughey,  Joe opposite Nicholas Cage, The Tender Bar opposite Ben Affleck, and The Card Counter opposite Oscar Isaac. He’s learned under the best in Hollywood.  Working with Sean Penn is a different game altogether, though. He holds his own opposite Penn in a role that asks a lot of him. He has a lot of heavy lifting in this role and does good work. This wasn’t an easy role to play. He knocks it out of the park.

I’ve seen films about an EMT or paramedic crew before. Bringing Out the Dead is the main one that comes to mind. That film had paramedics to some crazy state of drug-infused wildness for part of the movie. Nicolas Cage and Ving Rhames were good, but they had a weird fever dream aesthetic to them that made me not like them as much as other Martin Scorsese films. This film has some elements of that film but less of the originality that one had. It’s hard not to compare them because they are so similar in so many ways. The acting in this one is the main standout.

Besides Penn and Sheridan, the supporting cast is okay.  The supporting cast includes Nia (Kali Reis), a drugged-up pregnant woman, Nancy (Katherine Waterston), as the ex-lover interest of Penn’s character,  LaFontaine (Michael Pitt), an argumentative co-worker of Penn and Sheridan’s characters Clara (Raquel Nave), a lover interest of Shetidan’s character Chief Burroughs (Mike Tyson), the tough as nose boss of the house the guys work at and  Verdis (Gbenga Akinnagbe) one of the nicer paramedics that work with Penn and Sheridan’s characters. This cast was pretty good as supporting characters besides the two leads. They served their purpose nicely.

Asphalt City is a film set in New York City and it’s an unflinching look at the darker side of this metropolis.  As paramedics, these people see the worst aspects of this huge city. If you’re not careful it can eat you up and spit you out. That’s the moral of this story. Penn and Sheridan both do very good work in their roles. The direction by Stephane Sauvaire is just as good. It’s the story by Ben Mac Brown & Shannon Burke that is the real winner here. The story shows the dark side of what these men do every day. It’s a job that gets no respect from anybody. No matter how good a job these men do. They are constantly looking over their shoulders but they also have to develop a moral code. That code may not work for everybody. Trust in their partners is of the utmost importance in this difficult world.  A quote from Verdis one of the paramedics, “we all live in the darkness, we don’t have to let it inside”, is the crux of this story.

3 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen