Allen Hughes and Albert Hughes
1993
97 minutes
This is another 1990s gangsta-with-an-a barbershop chair film. It stars some mixture of Ice Cube or Wesley Snipe or Ice-T or Denzel Washington or Laurence Fishburne as a badass gangsta slinging crack in the hood.
You're not going to remember which one this is after the fact. It's probably the one where the main character is straight-up evil maybe. It might be the one where the old man from earlier who got Menaced and lost his nephew shoots the guy in the courthouse after his slick lawyer gets him off the hook for his crimes.
All you know is it's not Boyz n tha Hood since that one has the chubby kid who is supposed to be baby Ice Cube, which is pretty fucking funny.
You're pretty sure this is just pure gangsta shit with minimal-coming-of-age stuff in the middle. There are some drive-bys or something. This is from an age where guns are very American and a fundamental right, but driving while shooting a gun is a little bit too American somehow. An American not of African descent would have the decency to get out of the car first before shooting someone they had good reason to shoot. Shooting from a moving car is considered cheating, no matter how awesome the car. And, let's face it, most of the time in these it's not an awesome car.
You're not going to internalize the details of this or anything, but you can at least act cool with your black friends and participate in conversations and say "Which one was the one where Laurence Fishburne shoots at the burglar?" (That's also Boyz n the Hood.)
For the record, this is the one where they start out robbing a liquor store and they stupidly keep passing around the surveillance tape, if that helps. They're all good. You're going to watch them all eventually. And you should feel bad about not being able to keep them straight, but to be honest you have trouble keeping some of the French New Wave shit straight as well. So it's not like that.
Time to choose something different: