New Jack City

One of my favorite (for all the wrong reasons) things to see in a political campaign is the staged moments where the candidate participated in a ceremonial version of something blue-collar, like tapping in the first nail of a building with a golden hammer, or working the controls of machinery for a couple seconds. The transparency of the phoniness is hilarious to me. I always wonder if they really believe anybody can watch them doing something they clearly have never done, for all of 6 seconds, and think that anybody will buy into it. New Jack City is that politician, and the fraudulent activity its trying to imitate for the benefit of public appearance is Scarface. This movie wants to be a gritty, 80’s, New York-based, African-American Scarface. The rise and fall of a poor inner city kid to drug kingpin to dead. It wants to paint a grim picture of the nightmare of crack, and how AA gangs preyed upon their own neighborhoods to build their toxic empires. The problem is New Jack City isn’t interested in story arcs or character development. The movie is emotionally flat. It starts and ends and you watch events unfold, and nobody reacts to anything. Ice T’s cop character only shows anger at the very end, but for every other minute of the movie, he’s as cool and collected as a guy sitting on a beach. Judd Nelson’s character is so inconsequential, I’m not sure how he could have an arc. None of the underlings in the gang do much of anything besides be henchmen. That leaves Chris Rock’s squirrels Pookie and Wesley Snipes’ Nino as your emotional centers; one of them is a low-level crack addict turned informant, and the other is the bad guy. Nino never faces a challenge in his rise, and we never see him struggle before his rise, so there’s no tragedy in his fall into dealing drugs. We only ever know him as an arrogant scumbag, and he never learns his lesson. Even in his downfall (which feels all too brief and edited to hell and back) he’s still blustering and arrogant. There’s no catharsis and no emotional heft to his downfall because, like the characters, it isn’t given the time or investment to have any. And it’s a shame because being so emotionally and narratively dull flattens out great performances. You can see a steely determination in Ice T’s character, and you can feel that cleaning up the streets means more to him than a job, but the movie only gives him that in the last five minutes and does so as a pointless twist. Snipes puts on perhaps the best performance of his lifetime. Chris Rock proves he can do drama.  But it’s all in service of a script that just wants to get from A to B with minimal fuss and even less discussion of its themes. And the ham-handed after-school-special “we really ought to do something about the drug problem” message at the end feels tacked on and hollow in light of the fact that the movie spends 2/3 of its runtime making drug dealing look like a pathway to indescribable fortune. It’s almost ironic that, on more than one occasion, New Jack City shows scenes from Scarface. That’s the movie NJC wants to be, but it just doesn’t understand how.