NEW JACK CITY
“What am I, your ghetto tour guide, man?!?”
- Chris Rock as Pooky
I went in to NEW JACK CITY expecting a gritty street crime drama, but came out having an absolute blast at the unapologetically ridiculous action and one liners! There’s a training montage where Ice-T helps Chris Rock break his addiction to crack rock so they can go undercover to take down Wesley Snipes and the Cash Money Brothers who have created a drug lair in aHarlem apartment complex called The Carter. Lil Wayne loves it!
Like BOYZ N THE HOOD, this came out in 1991 and launched the acting career of a rapper, but that’s where the comparisons STOP (🛑😉). NEW JACK CITY has the over the over the top action of DEMOLITION MAN (1993), stylized cartoon villainy of BATMAN (1989) and DICK TRACY (1990), and the comedy of CB4 (1993).
Our ghetto tour guide is director and supporting actor, Mario Van Peebles, the son of the man who launched the blacksploitation film movement in 1971 with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. MVP’s feature length debut is throbbing with energy!
Orson Welles’ three minute tracking shot in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) is known as one of the greatest opening shots, but in New Jack City, we are flying above midtown Manhattan to reveal Central Park and the Chrysler building before flying all the way up to the the Queensboro Bridge to reveal Bill Nunn (Radio Raheem from DO THE RIGHT THING) holding a Wall Street type over the bridge by his ankles. In walks Wesley Snipes looking gorgeous in gaudy gold jewelry and orders him to be dropped to his death in slow mo, limbs flailing, in broad daylight!
The camera is completely kinetic for the rest of the film. Almost every other scene is shot in slanted dutch angles and moving with aggressive energy to capture the 90s you’re nostalgic for: woven gold, Kangol hats, Raiders gear, brick cell phones, full wall fish tanks, male vocal groups, choreographed dance sequences, crack dealers keeping customer profiles on 3.5” floppy disks, and Flava Fav!
There is the thinest veil of empathy showing the devastation of the crack epidemic, but you also have a man saying wedding vows to a crack pipe before he smokes it in front of that massive fish tank. The most poignant line of commentary comes from Snipes, as Nino Brown:
“You gotta rob to get rich in the Reagan era.”
If you can suspend your disbelief that Ice-T would play a character with the honky ass name Scotty Appleton, you will have a ball with New Jack City.
- Duncan