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One is a lead turn from Laurence Fishburne, who plays an undercover DEA proxy named Russell Stevens Jr. These dichotomies are perfectly dissected through the film’s central performances. And in its story of an undercover cop, it asks you to consider not the tragedy of the self he loses but the practicality of the self he finds. All the graphic violence feels like a thorough autopsy of decay at the dark center of American authority. It simply wonders which side will show cannier instincts for craven self-preservation. It could not give a shit about the spectacle of the battle between good and evil most people want to see. Working far outside comfortable boundaries of conventional morality, Deep Cover is the type of cop thriller where the codes with which an audience arrives are cast aside altogether. No cream, no delicate touch, just a blade doing its inevitable work without regard for the blood that may bubble beneath it. This film plays like a straight-edge blade slowly and sternly swiped over a deeply ugly, but immediately recognizable, American underbelly. If New Jack City was the D.A.R.E., 1992’s Deep Cover was the lacerating truth.

Lastly, there’s the film’s closing note: “If we don’t confront the problem realistically without empty promises and platitudes …” If you find this even a slightly pragmatic consideration of drug blight, well, Nino Brown has a bridge off which to drop you. Further, New Jack City pretends the demise of Chris Rock’s Pookie, a doomed addict conscripted by these cops as an informant, represents the tragic death of a friend rather than failed means to carceral ends.

DEEP COVER MOVIE

Then there’s Judd Nelson as his adorkably hard partner, who might as well be playing a member of Color Me Badd in a movie that also features the group’s songs. This was Ice-T’s first film role, and the alleged concerns he had about whether playing a cop would corrupt the cred he’d created as a socially conscious rapper holds him back far too often.

The necessary narrative counterpoint of the cops can’t possibly compare with the charisma that Wesley Snipes brings to the role, so the film leans on tired notions of lawman righteousness. Halfway through New Jack City, Nino basically becomes Tony Montana as a Bond villain, complete with a cane blade. But its flaws are more readily apparent now, namely in its ideological clash between blaxploitation roots, big-studio demands and, most of all, maintaining a straight-line posture of law and order as the heroes in the war on drugs. Taken on the terms of an electric, engaging action film, Mario Van Peebles’ film is fine. In its tale of drug kingpin Nino Brown’s futile quest for upwardly mobile legitimacy, New Jack City changed that for an entire age group … even as it spiffed the sort of story James Cagney had been telling 40 years earlier.

So we knew about drugs, just not the drudgery of them as a business in the way the parents or guardians we knew had jobs. also ignited a generation’s curiosity to explore such mythic contraband. told us all about drugs and that they were bad. program? The one that had in-class, in-uniform and intimidating visits from law enforcement officers, flimsy pledges to just say no, and an even flimsier theme song they conflated with unbreakable oath just because you sang along to a cassette recording of it in an elementary school gym? Yes, D.A.R.E. That’s not to say we didn’t know about drugs themselves. The self-imposed rules of the column: No films with an Oscar nomination and no films among their year’s top-10 box-office grossers.įor most lily-white elderly millennials raised in the suburbs or the sticks, 1991’s New Jack City represented a cinematic introduction to the inner workings of drug trafficking. In the Class of … series, Nick Rogers takes a monthly look back at films celebrating their 20th or 30th anniversary of initial release this year - seven from 1992 (the extra in a forthcoming double-feature column) and six from 2002.

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