Concrete Cowboy Review: Tells a Unique Story in an Overall Average Film!

Concrete Cowboy on Netflix was co-written and directed by Ricky Staub, co-written by Dan Walser, stars Idris Elba as Harp, Caleb McLaughlin as Cole, Lorraine Toussaint as Nessie, and Jharrel Jerome as Smush. After Cole gets in trouble at school for fighting, his mom sends him away for the summer to his estranged fathers in Philadelphia. Cole soon learns an unusual thing about the community and what he is meant to learn while there.

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If it were not for the unique story that Concrete Cowboy told, this would be another run-of-the-mill life changing summer movie. What makes this movie unique is that it tells the story of black urban cowboys, who to this day, have been maintaining and riding horses in north Philly. Now, I didn’t know this was a real thing until I heard about some press for the film, and that is exactly what I want to see from movies. Telling the stories of small groups makes them incredibly unique. Now, everything else in the film is about bang average.

The acting by all is done well, but no performance kept off the page. The score, camera work, dialogue, set design were all good. There are few negatives aside from the B plot with an old friend of Cole’s named Smush. Smush is doing illegal things to finance his dream of living on a ranch, and Cole gets roped into this. One could argue that this is how Cole rebels and then finds his way in the cowboy community, I would say that the way it ended up being written, that it was the ONLY way Cole’s story could have gone taking a lot of the element of choice out of it.

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All in all, Concrete Cowboy on Netflix is a good movie about a culture that is under attack and has some life lessons were thrown in (that we’ve seen before.) Watch ‘Concrete Cowboy’ on Netflix here.

Rating – 3/5 | Grade – B

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