'Asphalt City' aka 'Black Flies' has a point to make and goes the extra mile to drive it home. Casual moviegoers who want light, something uplifting are in the wrong place. Though you're not wrong to question if it's too heavy or removed from reality at times. It seems appropriate they set the tale in NYC as it was once the haven for hard boiled action flicks, horror nasties that liked to play up it's once seamy nature. As one who never sat thru the Nic Cage pic 'Bringing Out the Dead', I thought the ride here thru the ups and downs of a paramedic was unique if not scattershot.

Cross (Tye Sheridan) a newbie NYC paramedic gets a crash course in death, sadness and the futility of helping the public. Who sometimes distrust, loath, don't appreciate or abuse people in civil service frontline jobs. Mainly stuck to the nightshift, he lives in a rundown apartment with strangers and studies to become a doctor. Soon enough his world mentally starts to unravel and an incident with his veteran partner 'Rut' (Sean Penn) is either a really bad mistake or something much worse. A wakeup call to not go down the wrong path, circling the drain.

The story is mainly a collection of emergency calls of various states of panic, distress and the learning curve that goes along with it. The film is purposely dark and you see the correlations between the mens journeys at certain points. Michael Pitt & Gbenga Akinnagbe play fellow paramedics and in a bit of stunt casting Mike Tyson their immediate supervisor. Really the strength here is two leads - Sheridan, Penn - willing to throw themselves into their roles and what is has to say about the toll paid on people doing this for a living.

'Asphalt City' left me wondering a lot about paramedics. What they get paid, the worst of what they see and ultimately why they do it. Having it all go down in the city that never sleeps as opposed to small town USA wasn't lost on me. I knew the effect they were going for here at all times. Only in the last quarter of it's two hour runtime did I wish for a more fleshed out story, sanctuary from it's dark nature. It's not a home run, but it's also not bad like some people are making it out to be.

It's atmospheric, slow, dark. All the things that a good and bloody drama should be.

Perfectly cast with some great acting and not too over the top. Even the legendary Mike Tyson makes an appearance which, even though questionable as a casting, he pulls it off perfectly.

Thrown in at the deep end, the main protagonist, a rookie paramedic is on the verge of madness. The film shows exactly what emergency workers have to attend to, day in, day out, and how it affects them, bustling on the verge of madness and faced with the adversity of violence.

It certainly packs a punch. Known as 'Black Flies' in the UK. Give it a watch.

There is absolutely no doubt that 'Black Flies' is a grim movie. I confess I hadn't even heard of it and it seems to have slipped under the radar but for all of it's gloom and doom it is well worth watching. One thing the movie does very well is to make the viewer fully aware of just how horrendous being a paramedic can be and boy will you respect them more after this.

This is a well acted film with the two leads showing good chemistry and at times some ad-libbing if I'm not mistaken. One thing I absolutely hated though is the totally unnecessary nudity from one actress which added nothing to the movie apart from cheap thrills. It got to the stage where I was actually yelling at the screen 'put some cloths on love for crying out loud'. Rant over, this is a good effort, bleak but pretty decent.