Helmed by Phil Allocco, ‘5lbs of Pressure’ tells a story that is very true to its title, which describes the exact pressure needed to pull the trigger of a standard gun. The crime drama movie simultaneously chronicles the lives of three people who are connected by their past and present in a small neighborhood with a bad reputation. Adam is an ex-convict who is back after 16 years and hopes to reunite with his son, whereas Mike is a young drug dealer who hopes to grow past his uncle’s shadow and pursue a life without constraints. Eli, Mike’s friend, also has a connection to Adam, and as their storylines converge one fateful night, nothing remains the same. SPOILERS AHEAD.
5lbs of Pressure Plot Synopsis
‘5lbs of Pressure’ begins with Adam returning to his town after spending 16 years in prison for manslaughter, only to find that everything has changed way more than he anticipated. Still on parole, he decides to make a home in his friend’s garage and begins working as a bartender at the Mirror Bar. As it turns out, Adam had a family before we went to prison, and though he tries to reconnect with his ex-partner, Donna, in the hopes of meeting his estranged teenage son, Jimmy, he is promptly shut out. Dejected, he still manages to meet Jimmy at a local basketball court, and the two become friends. What Adam doesn’t know, though, is that his son is secretly battling a drug addiction and is connected to powerful, troublesome people in this town.
Parallel to Adam’s story, we are also introduced to Mike, the nephew of the biggest drug dealer in town, Leff. Still new to the business, Mike is frequently dominated by others and often requires Leff to save him from trouble. During a meeting with a drug smuggler, they are offered a chance to deal in heroin, and while Mike is eager to take up the mantle and the profits it can bring, Leff quickly turns down the offer, citing how risky certain drugs can be. From there, we are introduced to Mike’s best friend, Eli, who happens to be the brother of the man Adam killed years ago. Struggling with both work and his relationship with Keysha, Eli seems frustrated with life, and Adam’s return only infuriates him more by the day.
One day, Jimmy discovers Adam sketching people at the park, and gets gifted a drawing of a cartoon skull. However, Donna recognizes the drawing as something Adam used to draw for his son all the time. With the truth now forcefully out into the open, Jimmy storms back demanding an explanation, only to learn that his mother lied about Adam being a deadbeat. Elsewhere, Eli discovers that his girlfriend is cheating with Mike, and storms off in anger. Meanwhile, Mike, who thinks he is underpaid and powerless as a drug dealer, promises to take Keysha to Austin, Texas.
To get enough money, Mike makes the heroin deal behind Leff’s back, tying up with a violent criminal named E.R. for finances. However, when he is duped by the heroine dealers, he resorts to robbing stores to pay back the money. As fate would have it, he enters Mirror Bar just as Eli takes aim at Adam, and in the confusion of the moment, both friends shoot at each other. Mike gets shot in the head and dies, while Eli is left injured at the leg, leaving only Adam standing on his two feet, ready to talk things out with his own attacker.
5lbs of Pressure Ending: Is Adam Dead? Why Does Eli Kill Him?
‘5lbs of Pressure’ ends with Eli killing Adam in a moment of equal parts rage and panic, perpetuating the cycle of violence that haunts everyone in this town. Though there seems to be a second where both parties lower their guns, confused but ready to cooperate, that moment passes by just as quickly. Adam’s death is pointedly never seen, and all we get is a sonic confirmation from outside the Mirror Bar, implying that Eli decided to pick up the gun again and shoot, despite a part of him willing to make peace. His failure, then, can be seen as a larger commentary on the nature of bloodshed itself, as it is often carried forward by the hatred that is often left behind. In this case, Eli becomes a vessel of that hatred, hopelessly continuing the cycle in the process.
While Eli walks into the bar with the express reason of killing Adam and avenging his dead brother, that changes once he starts to hear Adam speak to his friend. When he realizes that the killer he has been mad at for 16 years is not a cold-blooded monster, but an ordinary person hoping to repent for his past, something inside Eli’s brain snaps. This is only aggravated when Adam is unable to even recognize Eli, and only tries to de-escalate the situation after realizing what is happening. On some level, Eli expected this to be a full-blown fight, and by the strange turns of fate, he gets that in the form of Mike, his own best friend. Their shootout is entirely the result of a misunderstanding, which ends at the cost of a human life.
Having killed Mike, Eli occupies a similar narrative position as Adam, who committed a similar crime at roughly a similar age. However, where he has been trying to make up for his actions for more than a decade, Eli succumbs to the cycle and only doubles down on his mistakes. Despite being offered a way out where he can be seen as a hero of the town, and potentially even get enough money to help his mother, Eli chooses to respond to his vendetta and kill Adam. Ironically, in the end, it’s Adam who’s christened the town hero, and yet everyone he knew and loved can only sit back and weep at the cruelty of the events. Eli, alive but injured, can only watch and perhaps reflect on whether any of what he did was worth it.
Will Leff Go to Prison? Why Does He Kill E.R.?
At the end of the movie, we see Leff walk into E.R.’s shack and kill him as revenge for the death of Mike. Since there’s not a lot of evidence surrounding Eli’s role in the murder, Leff naturally suspects the last person Mike was connected to, in this case, E.R., who also happened to threaten him with murder. Given that Leff’s car was at stake, it probably didn’t take him too long to track down exactly what transpired, and following that, he is left too blinded by rage to even question the details. Instead of talking to E.R. or demanding an explanation, he chooses to blast into the club and kill him without so much as a word. E.R.’s two accomplices are also likely killed in the exchange, and while we see Leff come along with another man, he’s likely not a big part of this equation.
Leff’s rage about the death of his nephew means that he makes absolutely no effort to plan or stake out the murder, and that costs him. With such a powerful figure killed in broad daylight, it takes the police only a little while to catch up to the scene and apprehend Leff on the spot. While we don’t get any updates on his fate after this point, it’s clear that he is arrested and is likely going to end up in prison for a long while. It’s possible that a part of him always knew that this was what would happen if he attacked E.R., but he went ahead with it anyway. His love for his nephew, though twisted in form, seemingly transcends all rationality, which is ironic considering Mike’s plan this entire time was to escape Leff’s shadow.
Leff’s actions serve as a direct parallel to Eli’s, in that they are both grieving family members who push themselves to the limit and create more acts of horror. While the former’s apprehension is confirmed, it’s not as if the latter is narratively abandoned in any way. Both characters now have to fight an internal battle and wrestle with the guilt that they might be feeling. When news channels of this world report the crimes, they list the deaths as two among many for the month alone, which once again puts things into perspective. Be it Adam, Eli, Mike, or Leff, these are all characters who are molded by their circumstances just as much as their circumstances mold them, but what ultimately differentiates them is how they respond to the choice to break the cycle.
Will Jimmy Break the Cycle? Does Keysha Make it to Texas?
When Jimmy learns of his father’s death, there is less rage in the air than there is a feeling of longing for memories that were never made. All of this happens before they can even properly reconcile, and ‘5lbs of Pressure’ purposefully pulls away from that moment of catharsis to make a larger point. None of the characters quite get the life that they asked for, or even any particular goal that they were looking forward to. And yet, the movie seems more interested in putting them, at their worst, into situations that can either be resolved peacefully or by violence. Something similar happens at the end of Jimmy’s arc, when he is handed Adam’s drawing book, where the final piece of art is the cartoon skull that he used to draw for his son. This time, however, the drawing has a new connotation, almost testing Jimmy to see if he will fall for the darkness.
As Jimmy flips the page over, he is met with a blank page, both literally and figuratively. With no other way to cope with Adam’s passing, he then decides to pick up a pencil and draw something from his heart. However, the movie never shows us what he is about to draw, or even if he will actually go through with the act. Symbolically, this gives him the power to craft his own fate, regardless of whether we are a part of it. He has the option to pour his heart and soul into something that makes him happy, or he can follow the path of Eli and look for vengeance. At the end, it is his own fate to draw, and while there is a chance that he might go out looking for Eli sooner than later, everything we have seen so far suggests that he will learn from his father’s best traits rather than the worst.
While Jimmy’s breaking of the cycle is left ambiguous, the one character who actually breaks free and starts anew is, surprisingly enough, Keysha. Despite not being central to the narrative, she is perhaps the only character who gets a bittersweet ending. After Mike promises to take her to Austin, Texas, to start a new life, Keysha boards the plane by herself, perhaps not even knowing that her partner has been killed. However, things seem to get put into perspective as she lands in a brand new city, where she can craft a future without the baggage of her past, both in time and space.
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