Menace II Society (1993)

(On TV, March 2020) Some movie-watching mediums are completely ill-suited to some kinds of films. Watching an action epic on a tiny screen makes no sense, and neither does watching a hard-R urban drama like Menace II Society on a regular TV channel considering how much muting the editors have to do in order to tone down the language. Which is a shame, because there’s quite a bit to admire in writer-directors The Hugues Brothers’ film. Historically, it’s part of an important movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s to put cameras into the hands of black filmmakers and let them tell a story of their own. What is now a cliché (inner-city drama of young people tempted by a life of crime) was new, provocative and fascinating at the time: there’s a fair case to be made that Menace II Society, along with such notable titles as Boyz n the Hood, Juice, South Central and others, codified an entire subgenre. The story is familiar stuff if you’re used to these kinds of films, but the Hugues Brothers, taking advantage of their experience shooting music videos, bring some additional style to a straight-up social drama. The position it stakes for its characters, stuck halfway between law and crime, is hardly revolutionary now but presumably hit harder at the time. This does, however, make character identification harder than in most films: it’s so dour that, at times, it’s not clear why I should be watching at all. Still, Menace II Society is not a bad movie—the situation hasn’t changed all that much in some strata of American society, and the film’s cinematic verve is a cut above others of the same ilk. Still, don’t make the mistake of trying to watch it on AMC—every other word is muted out in an ineffective attempt at censorship.