Starring Chadwick Boseman. Rated 14A

Originally called 17 Bridges, this routine crime thriller got an infrastructure upgrade somewhere along the way. No one gave it an injection of extra meaning, however, so 21 Bridges remains as forgettable as its title.

How routine is it? Well, it begins with a preamble showing the young Andre Davis getting traumatized by the death of his policeman father. More to the point, the dead dad’s boss is played by Keith David, the gruff black police chief in countless cop movies. Cut to the present day, and the gruff captain is now J.K. Simmons, chewing the NY scenery (mostly Philadelphia, in fact) after seven officers and a couple of civilians are mowed down by weapons-toting crooks while boosting a buttload of cocaine.

Briskly directed by Brian Kirk, an Irish journeyman with a lot of episodic TV under his belt, the movie shows some sympathy for the perps, a pair of small-timers played by True Detective’s Taylor Kitsch and, more prominently, If Beale Street Could Talk star Stephan James. They’ve walked in on a stash 10 times bigger than what they’d been told about, so you just know the big shootout that happens 10 minutes into story will not be the end of their travails.

Their more immediate problem is that Mr. Wakanda himself, Chadwick Boseman—as the grown-up Andre—is the homicide detective assigned to the case. He’s one sharp dude, but worse, he’s famous for being one trigger-happy mofo. It’s Det. Davis’s idea to shut down all arteries going in and out of Manhattan—hence the bridge thing—and this limits urban exits, as well as exit strategies for screenwriters Adam Mervis and Matthew Michael Carnahan, who exercise some pretty basic procedural tropes, along with the usual thin-blue-line jargon.

They’ve also given Andre a female counterpart, in the form of Sienna Miller’s Brooklyn-accented narcotics cop, but the filmmakers show little interest in their relationship, or any others. They’re far more focused on elaborate chase scenes—in cars, on foot, in the subway, and more—and these are efficiently handled. The actors do themselves neither harm nor good with this cynical exercise. They simply got from Point A to B, letting the traffic take them where it will.