Lastly, there’s the film’s closing note: “If we don’t confront the problem realistically without empty promises and platitudes …” If you find this even a slightly pragmatic consideration of drug blight, well, Nino Brown has a bridge off which to drop you. Further, New Jack City pretends the demise of Chris Rock’s Pookie, a doomed addict conscripted by these cops as an informant, represents the tragic death of a friend rather than failed means to carceral ends. Then there’s Judd Nelson as his adorkably hard partner, who might as well be playing a member of Color Me Badd in a movie that also features the group’s songs. This was Ice-T’s first film role, and the alleged concerns he had about whether playing a cop would corrupt the cred he’d created as a socially conscious rapper holds him back far too often. The necessary narrative counterpoint of the cops can’t possibly compare with the charisma that Wesley Snipes brings to the role, so the film leans on tired notions of lawman righteousness. Halfway through New Jack City, Nino basically becomes Tony Montana as a Bond villain, complete with a cane blade. But its flaws are more readily apparent now, namely in its ideological clash between blaxploitation roots, big-studio demands and, most of all, maintaining a straight-line posture of law and order as the heroes in the war on drugs. Taken on the terms of an electric, engaging action film, Mario Van Peebles’ film is fine. In its tale of drug kingpin Nino Brown’s futile quest for upwardly mobile legitimacy, New Jack City changed that for an entire age group … even as it spiffed the sort of story James Cagney had been telling 40 years earlier. So we knew about drugs, just not the drudgery of them as a business in the way the parents or guardians we knew had jobs. also ignited a generation’s curiosity to explore such mythic contraband. told us all about drugs and that they were bad. program? The one that had in-class, in-uniform and intimidating visits from law enforcement officers, flimsy pledges to just say no, and an even flimsier theme song they conflated with unbreakable oath just because you sang along to a cassette recording of it in an elementary school gym? Yes, D.A.R.E. That’s not to say we didn’t know about drugs themselves. The self-imposed rules of the column: No films with an Oscar nomination and no films among their year’s top-10 box-office grossers.įor most lily-white elderly millennials raised in the suburbs or the sticks, 1991’s New Jack City represented a cinematic introduction to the inner workings of drug trafficking. In the Class of … series, Nick Rogers takes a monthly look back at films celebrating their 20th or 30th anniversary of initial release this year - seven from 1992 (the extra in a forthcoming double-feature column) and six from 2002.
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