Movies that attempt to capture the here and now don’t always date very well. But John Singleton’s 1991 drama is just as compelling today as it was back then. With exceptional performances from Ice Cube and Cuba Gooding Jr, a tight script and a stunning soundtrack, it’s a powerful movie that deserves its 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating and to be among the best Netflix movies. Released the same year as Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City, it’s arguably the superior movie. It’s certainly a lot grittier.
The movie centers on Gooding Jr’s Tre, a young man growing up in south central LA. His father, played by Laurence Fishburne, knows the temptation of the wrong path and tries to help Tre avoid it, but he can’t be everywhere – and Tre’s friends Doughboy and Ricky are being drawn into the local gang culture, with terrifying results.
It’s a powerful, sometimes sad and occasionally brutal movie that pulls off the tough trick of having sympathy for its protagonists without either glamorizing the gangs or turning into a morality play. It’s an exceptional movie.
“This is a post-apocalyptic world”
NME said that “Singleton’s stunning coming-of-age film offers a compelling and compassionate snapshot of life for a young Black man growing up amid the gang culture of South Central Los Angeles”, while the LA Times wrote that “like a jazz ensemble, Singleton and his actors slowly involve us in an almost sensual melange of moods, images and situations that take us inside the ghetto in a way mainstream films almost never do.”
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel said that “emotionally, this film will leave you grim-faced and shaken. It hits hard where so many films aim and miss — at the heart.” And Film Threat said that “It’s a sadly optimistic and touching classic that confidently conveys a coherent solemn mood of a modern American wasteland.”
That wasteland didn’t just appear from nowhere. While the core of the movie is in its characterization, part of its power – and one of the reasons it’s still so vital today – is in the way it shows the wider picture, the world in which drug and gang culture could take root and flourish. As the New York Times said that “in essence, this is a post-apocalyptic world. Except what was destroying their landscape wasn’t an alien invasion or a virus. It was ravaged by white supremacy.”