This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Action, Drama, Mob, Crime and Scam Movies, N. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Mario Peebles
Starring: Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, Allen Payne, Chris Rock, Judd Nelson, Mario Van Peebles, Bill Nunn, Vanessa Williams
Actor /director has been at the helm for many a bad movie and precious few good ones. This is his crown jewel. Likewise, it is one of Wesley Snipes best efforts. This moody, streetwise cops & robbers’ feature strives to be an African-American version of Scarface and comes pretty close in many scenes, but lacks the consistency in characters, story and acting to truly reach such lofty heights. The gangster characters are strong and uniformly well-performed, but the cops are sometimes poorly written, and in the case of Judd Nelson, poorly played. The story starts strong, but gets trigger happy and weaker towards the end.
Wesley Snipes is fantastic as Nino Brown, the leader of some criminally inclined friends in NYC, just as crack is exploding onto the drug scene. Nino is a true street entrepreneur and soon designs a drug empire. After that all he has to do is hold it together in the face of the Mafia, internal conflict and police attention in the form of a special drug squad that includes Scotty (Ice-T in a fine early performance) and Judd Nelson in the worst performance of his career. Look for an early and very promising performance by Chris Rock. The first two thirds of the movie are fairly taut and impressive, but unravels a little during act three.
For fans of inner city drama, or gangster films, this is well worth seeing for its compelling depiction of gang life. There are some interesting characters and very good performances by actors that we have seen a lot of since. It compares most easily to Scarface and fans of that classic will likely enjoy this as well.
