New Jack City (DVD)

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Disloyalty, greed, and the drugs themselves finally do in Nino and his gang, which is the way we would expect things to turn out, so there are no surprises there. "New Jack City" tells a purely conventional story, but it unfolds in unique and innovative ways, with particularly good turns from its cast, all of which make it a worthwhile watch.

Video:
The picture quality looks good thanks to WB's high-bit rate, anamorphic transfer. The image is a tad soft in focus overall, but its colors are exceptionally natural, the hues varying to some degree in brightness but not in realistic texture. There is very little noticeable grain, very few shimmering lines, and no digital artifacts that I could see. The movie may be dark and violent, but the visuals are a pleasure to the eye.

Audio:
Since most of the movie is comprised of music and dialogue, the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound reproduction has to be clear and linear. Fortunately, it's up to the challenge. A robust bass and a clean midrange serve the hip-hop tunes well; and when the music settles down long enough for the dialogue to shine through, it, too, is clean and well balanced. Understand, most of the music is necessarily loud and blaring, so be prepared to modify the volume from time to time. For action sequences, like gunfights and helicopter flyovers, the sonics are properly dynamic.

Extras:
I liked the extras in this two-disc set almost as much as I liked the movie. Disc one contains the widescreen presentation of the film, with English and French spoken languages and English, French, and Spanish subtitles. It also contains thirty-four scene selections (but no chapter insert) and a widescreen theatrical trailer. However, the main attraction is an audio commentary with the director and costar Mario Van Peebles. It's among the best such commentaries you'll find, thanks to Peeble's appealing speaking voice and his intelligent analysis. I suppose you could say this is a little unfair to other directors who may not be trained, professional actors as well as directors, but that's their misfortune. This is one commentary to enjoy.

Disc two contains three, new, documentary featurettes, each of them a continuation of the others. The first, "The Road to New Jack City," is a twenty-eight-minute, behind-the-scenes affair with the actors and filmmakers today looking back on the movie they made together. It's consistently informative and entertaining. The second, "NJC: A Hip-Hop Classic," is twenty more minutes on the themes and impact of the film. The third item, "Harlem World: A Walk Inside," is a ten-minute tour of the inner city with Peebles, a group of children, and Christopher Moore, a historian with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Finally, there are three music videos that appropriately round out the affair: "New Jack Hustler" by Ice T, "I'm Dreamin'" by Christopher Williams, and "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd.

The two discs come in a slim-line keep case, further enclosed in a fancy, embossed, metal-foil slipcover. What I continue to wonder is how studios can justify the cost of slipcovers yet not provide chapter inserts. My good friend and colleague Eddie Feng once told me the studios liked slipcovers to help guard against in-store thefts. Maybe. Another mystery of life.

Parting Thoughts:
"New Jack City" may be a bit too ambitious for its own good, trying to cover all its bases by devoting equivalent time both to the good guys and the bad guys. Despite this seeming handicap, Peebles and his crew pull it off reasonably successfully, thanks largely as I said before to the dynamism of the stars, the well-integrated musical tracks, and the extensive NYC location shooting. They turn a pedestrian script into an above-average gangster thriller.

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