Gnarly, raw, unfiltered - prerequisites for many movies I enjoy. While Asphalt City checked all these boxes, it left me wanting more. Felt to me like Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan’s characters remained largely the same for the vast majority of the movie, with a mad dash for metamorphosis at the end. The film also bordered on redundancy (how many ambulance scenes does it take to reinforce to the audience that EMS is a tough, thankless, at times, horrific, gig?) with the true inciting incident not occurring until almost the third act.
