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"He's America's worst nightmare: Young, black, and he doesn't give a fuck."

-- Caine

The premise to Menace II Society is pretty much identical to that of Boyz N The Hood. One guy talks shit about some other guy's mother, gets capped, then a bunch of bigger, badder American Americans serve justice via the bullets of their UZIs, and so on and so on.

The Hughes brothers' 1993 picture portrays a vicious circle of violence within the black community, and how absurdly difficult it is for the youth to overcome it ("This is the truth. This is what's real.") There's no doubt this has been an influential picture considering it's being widely imitated in video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and various skits on Hip-Hop albums.

The part of "O-Dog" here was originally made for Tupac Shakur, though the character was later assigned to Larenz Tate after the rapper supposedly assaulted director Allen Hughes. Despite the "lesser name", though, Tate is hugely convincing in his performance of an angry ghetto youth; actually, pretty much the whole cast appears chillingly-unsentimental, speaking the regional slang and dialect of urban Los Angeles with great vibrancy.

Menace is a successfully-bleak portrayal of life in the hood, but compared to Boyz it never really has a point, though. Violence is bad, yes, but what's lacking is the Lawrence Fishburne-type character who takes a strong, moralistic stance on the various issues of the poverty, drugs and racism that influences the violence. There were points that I thought the Grandfather figure (Arnold Johnson) or the preacher Sharif (Vonte Sweet) were going to take a firm lead in the picture and dig deeper into the ghetto philosophy, but they ended up only being characters that lurked within the background -- they were too underdeveloped for my liking.

It didn't connect with me as emotionally as Boyz N The Hood did, but Menace to Society, without a doubt, is still a pretty powerful depiction of real life tragedy, which you really shouldn't ignore.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2009.