96 Minutes

Lagos draws strong performances from her young cast, as well as David Oyelowo, who plays Ross’ uncle and guardian, but they don’t have much to work with. The younger characters, who still live in the environment that made them, are more easily defined, but Snow reads as a generic heroine and Serratos barely reads at all—not surprising considering she spends much of her screen time prone and whimpering. Lagos shuttles back and forth in time to explain how these four characters ended up sharing a predicament, but the scrambled chronology feels more like a defensive tactic, an attempt to disguise the story’s familiar contours without actually adding any significant complication.

It’s not surprising to learn that Lagos based the story on events that happened when she was a college student, or that her experience of both violent trauma and poverty comes secondhand. Although 96 Minutes proffers equal time to its quartet of protagonists, it becomes clear that its ultimate sympathies lie with Snow, which, given that hers is the only character who’s both wealthy and white, undermines the film’s inchoate humanism. The title refers to the time elapsed between the initial carjacking and when Snow finds help, a fairly arbitrary marker given that the other characters don’t share the same timeline. The movie’s coda, which gives Snow the chance to lecture one of her assailants, is not only superfluous but ugly, unloading a sense of smug superiority while ignoring the issues it purports to address.