New Jack City (DVD)

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Sometimes, I just don't get it. I mean, "New Jack City" from 1991 is a good movie, but good enough for a two-disc Special Edition set? When Warner Bros. at this writing still hadn't released "The African Queen" on DVD? Oh, well. We get what we get, and there's no questioning that "New Jack City" is worth the attention.

One can't help noticing (and the director, Mario Van Peebles, freely admits) that "New Jack City" is trying its best to emulate two successful gangster films of a few years earlier, "The Untouchables" and "Scarface." If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, then "NJC" is flattering, indeed. It doesn't succeed in equaling its two distinguished predecessors, but that surely isn't for lack of trying. Moreover, it's successful in its own right, creating a convincing, tough-minded portrait of drug lords and undercover cops.

The idea was to produce a crusading antidrug film, the antidrug theme hammered home by a written afterword announcing that although the film is fiction, the drug lords in it "exist in every major city in America." The "however" is that the movie sometimes forgets its message in the onslaught of high-octane action and violence. While it never for a minute glamorizes drugs, drug taking, or drug selling, it does tend occasionally to forget its purpose and revel a bit much in the exploits and operations of the drug community. But when these digressions do occur, the movie soon finds its direction again.

What works best in the film is the energy of its stars, particularly Ice T as the undercover cop, Scotty Appleton, and Wesley Snipes as the drug kingpin, Nino Brown. Although Snipes gets top billing, it's a toss-up which actor you'll remember the most after watching the film. Ice T's Appleton is a street tough turned New York City police detective, a rogue with whom nobody wants to work. Yet he's not just the Dirty Harry of typical crime films; he's genuinely troubled, unsettled, and searching for something he finds undefinable. Well, this is the film that defined the actor's Hollywood career, and he's probably never equalled it since.

Snipes as the drug lord is also on strong ground, and his characterization of Nino is more complex than you'd expect. On the one hand, Nino is sweet and charismatic; he sees himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, taking on the rich establishment, providing people with what they want, and getting fabulously wealthy in the process. He takes over an apartment building for his center of illegal operations, then opens up a soup kitchen to feed the needy residents, giving them products and appliances to win their confidence. On the other hand, Nino is a killer, a vicious murderer who will stop at nothing to make his fortune. He sees his life as a shining example of the American Dream, the poor boy taking advantage of the opportunities the country offers him; and if he has to do in a few people to make that dream come true, so be it. His heroes are Al Pacino's Tony Montana from "Scarface," a movie he plays over and over in his palatial mansion, as well as Warner Bros. gangster stars George Raft and Jimmy Cagney.

Things that also work well in the film are its integration of hip-hop music into the soundtrack, something we have come to take for granted a decade-and-a-half later, as well as its sometimes surprising changes of pace. The first chase sequence early on in the movie, for instance, is not done in speeding cars crashing around corners but on foot and on bicycle through a park.

What doesn't work so well is the movie trying to divide its time almost equally between the cops and the gangsters and never fully coming to terms with either group of people. I mentioned this movie's resemblance to "The Untouchables"; in "NJC," too, we get an incorruptible unit of undercover investigators brought together to bring down Nino and his gang. Stone (played by the movie's director, Mario Van Peebles) is the head of an independent police task force dedicated to cleaning up drugs in the city, and he requests that Scotty be brought in and teamed up with another hothead, Nick Peretti (Judd Nelson, with not nearly so much screen time as we'd like). Scotty and Nick hate each other from the outset, but there's no questioning their dedication to crime fighting. The team also picks up a junkie-turned-informant, Pookie, played by Chris Rock in possibly the most serious and convincing role of his career. Nevertheless, none of them are given enough screen time to flesh out their roles or make us care too much about them.

On the opposite side of the fence, Nino has also surrounded himself with friends and "family." Gee Money (Allen Payne) is his business partner in crime as well as his oldest and best friend. Then there are girlfriends and bodyguards and lawyers all over the place who enter the picture with their own stories. But unlike "The Untouchables" where the tale of the treasury agents was foremost, or "Scarface" where the account of the gangster's rise to power was our principal interest, "New Jack City" attempts to cover both camps, doing so more superficially. In addition, we get a subplot involving Nino's conflicts with the Italian Mafia, another diversion that might have been explored further or left out entirely. The film is only about 100 minutes long, and there is only so much it can accomplish in that time.