Parents' Guide to Asphalt City

This dismal drama is unrelenting in its intense barrage of trauma. It's true that a paramedic's job can be tough, stressful, and sad due to the sheer amount of death and disaster they have to see up-close. But there can be moments of joy, levity, and the goodness of the human spirit, too—not that you'd know any of that from watching Asphalt City. Or that many paramedics must deal with a lot of social and political disparity, too: Some of their calls are basically "house visits" to patients who regularly need assistance, such as the elderly or low-income folks who don't have health insurance.

Shows like Chicago Fire and 9-1-1 do a better job than Asphalt City of depicting the range of cases that a paramedic team can take on; not all of them are critical or even dramatic. Here, the trauma is ratcheted up to an almost unbelievable degree—for example, a scene that shows an asthmatic man collapsing on the floor of his butcher shop is interspersed with clips of another man cutting up goats in the processing area, dripping blood and all. It's hard to see what the shots of butchered goats add to showing the dire stakes of getting a man intubated; that life-or-death drama is already enough. The result is that the scenes about paramedic life don't have a lot of time to breathe—it feels more like the film wants to punch viewers in the face (which is apt, since notorious boxer Mike Tyson co-stars as the fire station's chief). Penn does his best to bring some kind of humanity to his hard-boiled role, but in this film, the performances somehow don't matter. What sadly takes center stage is how much the film seems to want to make paramedic work seem as unattractive and uninspirational as possible.