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Fit every stereotype you can into 95 minutes of film and what you have is this BET original flick about the 2003 Northeast blackout.

I will admit that I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing Blackout. It’s a film about how residents in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood turned on each other when the power went out on 50 million people on a hot August day five years ago.

When I watch movies, I do it to escape reality – not emphasize it. I get enough of the crud of life in the nightly news. Still, if handled properly, a film about true events can captivate me even more than a fictitious work.

Unfortunately, this film fails to engage viewers with unique concepts that offer a different view of humanity’s loss of order and reason when something goes wrong. Director Jerry LaMothe spends nearly 30 minutes setting up the characters – way too much time. There are also too many characters, so the audience doesn’t have a sense of who to care about.

The stereotypes were so droll, I spent more time admiring the sandwich I was eating than becoming engaged with the movie. You’ve got the gangsta boy wannabes/up-and-comers, the boy who does good and is going places (and, of course, gets killed), mouthy older tenants who hold up the stoop, neighborhood barbers, young couples with problems, and rich apartment owner who wants to push out the poor residents to make way for better-paying customers. There is also abbreviated appearances by real ganstas who like to play their gansta rap really loud in their pimped-out car.

Hm… See anything interesting or different there? I didn’t think so.

Blackout follows these people throughout the intensely-hot day without air conditioning, access to money or, apparently, common decency. It’s not long after the power goes off that looting begins. People hole up in their own apartments and don’t even think about checking on their neighbors until the body of the Good Boy is found on the apartment stoop.

What I thought was interesting was that this film concentrated on the negative aspects of the people, with a few pot-shots at The Establishment for not getting to East Flatbush quick enough to help the people. Yet, the true stories shared by some in one of the DVD extras were, for the most part, really great. These people talked about how neighbors came together, got to know each other, shared what they could and made the blackout almost like a party.

DVD extras also include an interview with director LaMothe, deleted scenes, interviews with cast members and a behind-the-scenes look at the film.

If you want to know more about the largest blackout in North American history, visit Wikipedia, but avoid this flick if you can. It’s too dry and two-dimensional to make you care.

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