![]() ![]() They win viewers’ sympathies when the the store’s owners eye them suspiciously and follow them around in a none-too-subtle bit of racial profiling. In the first scene, Caine and his younger friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate) enter a corner store to buy some liquor. #SPITTA MENACE II SOCIETY HOW TO#If a movie teaches you how to watch it in its opening moments, Menace II Society instructs viewers to stay on edge and throw out assumptions. To him it doesn’t even feel like he has a say in the matter, and nothing around him suggests otherwise. No wonder, when asked if he wants to live or die, Caine doesn’t have an immediate answer. Recalling his father’s death in a drug deal gone bad and his mother’s overdose, Caine has come to think of their ends as inevitabilities. When his father kills a man who owes him money and mocks the idea of repaying it, Caine sees that the wrath of God doesn’t come crashing down in punishment. Jackson, in a chilling cameo) deal drugs and his mother (Khandi Alexander) take drugs. In a flashback accompanied, like much of the film, by Caine’s puzzled voiceover, we witness Caine as he grows up watching his father (Samuel L. ![]() The Hugheses pack the film with queasily thrilling violence committed by tough-talking, amoral men, but it’s animated by weary fatalism and a slow-simmering anger at a world that grinds up promise and turns out desperation and crime. gangster film, like the one the film’s protagonist, recent high school grad/small-time drug dealer “Caine” Lawson (Tyrin Turner) watches while recuperating from a gunshot wound. If Boyz N the Hood is the contemporary equivalent of a golden age Hollywood melodrama, Menace II Society is akin to a classic Warner Bros. That’s not the same as a hope that it will, however. But beneath the random acts of bloodshed and unrelenting bleakness, there’s a wish the world would change. None of the film’s leads get out alive or, at best, unscarred. Unlike Boyz N the Hood, it doesn’t reserve the possibility of a happy ending for some of its characters. But the film also comes from a place of deep concern. Yes, it’s filled with nihilistic characters and grim scenarios, depicting 1990s Watts as a hopeless place in which base instincts and a will to survive override moral impulses. Hughes isn’t wrong, but the term “nihilism” only hazily describes Menace II Society. “Then we watched the movie,” Hughes continues, “and were like ‘We ain’t got nothing to worry about here.’ That’s a different thing. They were already deep at work on Menace when Singleton’s film hit theaters in the summer of 1991, earning praise for the realism with which it depicted life in South Central L.A. ![]() “The dream is over,” Albert recalls thinking in a 2021 conversation with Williams and Elvis Mitchell included on the new Criterion Collection edition of Menace II Society, the Hughes Brothers’ 1993 directorial debut. Directors Allen and Albert Hughes and their screenwriting partner Tyger Williams started to worry when they first heard about John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood. ![]()
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