Of all the characters, Caine is the most problematic. Pinkett's Ronnie is wonderfully strong, sassy and beautiful: in short, too smart to want someone like Caine to be her life companion in a strange city. Tate gives a scary, red-hot performance as O-Dog, the screenplay offers no clue as to who he really is. If "Menace II Society" is terrific on ambiance, it is considerably less successful in revealing character. Sequences in which Caine and his posse hang out and toy with guns, drinking beer and spouting an endless litany of sullen profanities, offer a convincing close-up picture of a generation of black teen-agers lost in inner-city hell. But the film's crackling ensemble acting, which involves a good deal of improvisation, gives a number of those scenes an intense, painful believability.
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The screenplay, which was written by Tyger Williams from a story he wrote with the Hughes Brothers, is little more than a jerry-built mechanical contrivance on which to hang a series of searing pictures of inner-city life.
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The rest of the movie becomes a race against time: Whether Caine, who is now a killer and who has impregnated another woman, can survive the streets of Los Angeles before the lovers can make their escape. With Pernell's blessing, she invites him to start a new life with her in Atlanta, where she has the promise of a decent job. Caine's only hope of salvation lies in Ronnie (Jada Pinkett), the girlfriend of Pernell (Glenn Plummer), Caine's imprisoned mentor. After rival gang members ambush him and a cousin while they are sitting in a car, killing the cousin and wounding Caine, he and his posse wreak lethal revenge at a burger stand. "Menace II Society," which opened locally today, follows Caine's irreversible plunge into deeper levels of violence the summer after his high school graduation. By the time Caine is a teen-ager, both parents are dead, and he lives with upright Christian grandparents whose biblical sermonizing has no impact on him. In an apartment drenched in red light, the boy witnesses his father casually shooting a crony during a card game in an argument over money. This aura of front-line reportage informed by an action-comics visual flair defines the tone of the movie, which disturbingly blurs the line between brutal slice-of-life realism and sensationalistic gore.Īmong the film's most powerful scenes are lurid, dreamlike flashbacks to Caine's childhood, when his father was a drug dealer and his mother a heroin addict. Later in the film he boastfully plays and replays it for his friends, freeze-framing the video at the moment the grocer's brains are blown out.įilmed in a jerky cinema verite style, the opening scene has the jarring immediacy of a television news flash enhanced with expressionistic camera angles and color. Running to the back of the store, he kills the grocer's wife and seizes the store's surveillance tape. When the grocer mutters an insult, O-Dog goes ballistic, pulls a gun and shoots him in the head. In the riveting opening scene of "Menace II Society," a tense transaction between a Korean grocer and two young black men in South-Central Los Angeles explodes into lethal violence.Ĭaine (Tyrin Turner), a high school senior who lives with his grandparents, has gone out to buy some beers with his volatile sidekick O-Dog (Larenz Tate).