Menace II Society (1993)

Whoever said this movie is 7 stars and the best black gangster movie ever.... smh no. The acting is horrible. And I know that it came out in the 90s but that is no excuse. The worst part of it all is the re-used soundbytes. Such as when the shootout occurs at the market, you can hear the actors saying many different expletives but they are the same recording used over and over. Its horrible. Basically what happened is that the directors were lazy and had the actors record a phrase in the studio, and then they used it in many different places throughout the movie. While the phrase "m----r f----r" is said 39 times in the movie, it is actually only recorded 18 times. That means that 21 times that the phrase is said the directors told the engineers to just use the phrase from another part of the movie. HORRIBLE!The story has no meaning. None of the characters learn anything, no moral is expressed. its not like in Boyz n the Hood when the characters are constantly facing decisions that inevitably lead to a lesson to be learned in ethics. In Menace II Society the lesson is "if you kill a bunch of people and then move away, then you will be fine in life. But if you don't hurry up and leave in time then you will be killed." Or maybe "if you get a girl pregnant then you can just leave that girl and move away to a new city and everything will be fine, but if you don't then you will die." This is ridiculous.This is the first movie directed by the Hughes Brothers, and it was over-hyped because of a bunch of other similar (and better) movies that came out around the same time. Notice these guys only made about 10 movies in life, and barely any of them are better than 5 stars. Sorry, it is what it is.

Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner) and best friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate) go into a grocery store. O-Dog takes offense from the Korean storekeeper's comment and shoots him and his wife. Caine's father (Samuel L. Jackson) was a drug dealer and cold-hearted killer. He grew up with his grandparents. Caine and his cousin Harold are carjacked. Harold is murdered. O-Dog and Caine go to kill the carjackers. O-Dog is gleeful about his murderous spree while Caine is much more hesitant. Caine is eventually arrested for the grocery store killings and his life spirals downwards.The Hughes brothers are able to bring a vision of urban gangsterism that is cold-hearted and bleak. Larenz Tate is amazing as the unflinching joyful killer. His glee and pride of killing the Korean couple is the best in the movie. Tyrin Turner is not as compelling as an actor. The movie essentially follows the less interesting character. Caine is portrayed more as a regular guy struggling against his bad upbringing and his surroundings. It would be better to have O-Dog beside him voicing the evil side for the entire movie.

I saw , quite surprisingly, the critics liked it. I forgot my usual assessment, if the critics like it , beware. I watched the first few minutes and heard the over the top swearing, and had misgivings, don,t get me wrong I,m not averse to swearing, but gratuitous swearing, tends to detract from the content. The film forty eight hours has a great moment, when Nick Nolte,s girlfriend, calls him ,having been stood up for the second time, She says "Jack," he says "Yeh"" F---. you", and puts down the phone , great impact funny, not gratuitous because only a swear word would do. I didn,t continue to watch the film, and could,t see why anyone would like it let alone praise it. Critics seem averse to entertainment, action, or a "feel good story". Prefering some formulaic dreary repetitive "realism" type story.

"We are being asked to take even larger doses of a medicine that has proved to be deadly and to undertake commitments that do not solve the problem, but only temporarily postpone the foretold death of our economy." - Hieronymos II (head of Greece's Orthodox Church) "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." - Martin Luther King, Jr "Austerity is difficult, absolutely, but it's necessary, for rich and poor alike, black and white." - Frank Campbell"The more things change, the more they stay the same." - Jean Baptiste Karr Albert and Allen Hughes direct "Dead Presidents" and "Menace 2 Society". Both films purport to be "serious" examinations of the trials and tribulations of post-Vietnam African Americans, but in reality function more as giant exploitation films. The influence here is Scorsese's "Goodfellas", which the young Hughes brothers – the perfect age to be seduced by Scorsese's pyrotechnics - attempt to mimic blow for blow. And like Scorsese's film, though absent of his considerable style, the Hughes' work here is thin, melodramatic and sensationalistic, with deaths, screams, headshots, bombast, snorting, swearing and fury schematically rolled out to shock, bludgeon and titillate rather than edify. An entire resurgence in African American film-making would be corrupted in the early 1990s with such films."This is how it really was," the brothers would claim in interviews, positing their early films as a response to John Singleton's (underrated) "Boyz n the Hood". Their films, the brothers claimed, portrayed the reality behind Singleton's supposedly "rosy" portrayal of the African American experience. But time has been unkind to their pictures. And as the baseline for what constitutes "realism" constantly moves, today "Dead Presidents" and "Menace to Society", once touted as being a form of "black neorealism" or "black naturalism", seem hilariously overcooked and gratuitous. And as with all these films, there is little understanding of why our cast of African Americans do what they do, behave how they behave or examination of the power structures and psycho-socio-economic forces at work. (Both films essentially boil down to blacks killing for money; but "economics" is itself the cause of "the problem", stretching all the way from Vietnam to the Slave Trade to the Roman Empire) Still, there are good moments scattered about. "Menace to Society" opens with its best scene, an impromptu robbery/massacre in which a couple of black kids shockingly gun down the Asian shop-workers who insulted them. If disrespect is the root of all violence, we see that here, the larger marginalization of, or systemic disrespect toward, African Americans breeding both feelings of unworthiness and its opposite, a kind of manic need to protect, sometimes violently, brutalized egos. Black culture may have been mocked in the 90s for its "bling", its hysterical materialism, but this, as well as the numerous riots which rocketed across the US in the early 90s, was an understandable "response" to both widespread feelings of neglect and a culture with conflates wealth and worth. One should not have to prove one's humanity, one's worthiness, and when one is constantly forced to do so, pressure builds and one sometimes snaps. What's pertinent about "Menace's" "snaps" is that the victim's of such black aggression are always minorities or other blacks. Meanwhile, white faces are absent from the picture. Society functions in a similar way, Power deflecting hate away from itself – "down" the "social hierarchy" - and onto others. Unfortunately the rest of the picture degenerates into gratuitous gore and violence.Better than "Menace" is "Dead Presidents", which opens in 1968 and attempts to charter the lives of three friends (played by Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and Freddy Rodriguez) from the Bronx. They fight in Vietnam, are abandoned by the state, struggle to make a living, battle addiction and are then drawn to a life of crime.Like "Menance", "Presidents" at time shows traces of political savvy – one of the guards killed during the robbery is himself a Vietnam vet - but sensationalism, cynically employed shocks and thriller set pieces eventually undermine claims to earnestness. Blame Scorsese for this. Singleton's "Boyz n the Hood" was released before "Goodfellas" and so is stylistically somewhat different from most "African American" films of the period.5/10 – Worth one viewing.