Sundance review: 'At the Ready' is an absorbing look inside a Texas high school's training of future law enforcement officers

‘At the Ready’

★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 96 minutes.

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Teenagers learn serious life lessons, and how to take down a bad guy, in “At the Ready,” an absorbing documentary about the complexities of life along the U.S./Mexico border.

Welcome to Horizon High School in El Paso, Texas, where students learn the skills to become law-enforcement officers in the school’s Criminal Justice program. They’re good skills to have in a city 10 miles from the border, across from Ciudad Juarez, where the FBI, DEA and Border Patrol all have offices.

Director Maisie Crow primarily follows three students. Cristina is a recent graduate of Horizon, trying to land a job with the Border Patrol. Cesar aims to find a career that will feed his mom and kid brother, since his father is in prison on a drug-trafficking offense. And Mason aims to show he has leadership abilities, while also discovering truths about his sexual identity. (Mason came out as a transgender man after filming ended.)

Crow gets her cameras into the students’ classes and homes, and into a competition held among similar programs at Texas high schools. “At the Ready” shows that opinions about the law, police and immigration aren’t cut and dried along the border, and the conversations make for an intriguing movie.