Tabloid headlines surrounded its theatrical release: Tupac Shakur, originally cast in a small role, was convicted of assaulting Allen Hughes after being fired from the film. Jackson, and Jada Pinkett (in her big-screen debut), the film’s soundtrack spent six weeks atop the Billboard R&B chart in the summer of ’93.
Premiering at Cannes with a screenplay by their friend Tyger Williams and supporting roles for Samuel L. The Hughes brothers- twins who spent the bulk of their childhood in the greater LA area-made their names as music video directors, and wrapped Menace II Society on a $3.5 million budget before their twenty-first birthday.
Quickly enthralled by a movie with environs and circumstances almost entirely foreign to mine, I was startled to find that what resonated with me most wasn’t Menace ’s cutting looks at the delicacy of urban life but rather its improbably familiar rendering of American male adolescence. Minutes removed from the company of my best friends-young men who, it’s worth noting, bore little resemblance to the characters on-screen-the Watts cityscapes would illuminate my darkened room and already-fading buzz, images blurred, dialogue bleeped, and narrative chopped into segments between ads for cut-rate diets and 1-800 phone-sex hotlines. My adolescence is colored by recollections of returning home on Friday and Saturday nights and finding Caine and O-Dog on VH1 or E! or another channel high in the basic cable package of whichever house or apartment or dorm I was occupying. Weirder still, Menace has spent most of its existence lurking in the neon-glow purgatory of late-night cable, its neo-noir set pieces and bloody violence outweighing its trenchant social commentary whenever the film’s broadcast rights were lapped up and doled out to the Viacom and Comcast networks. It’s tied so inextricably to real people and events- Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, the ’92 riots -that the film itself can seem beside the point.
A sentimental coming-of-age tale about a group of black Los Angeles teenagers culminating in a slow-motion drive-by shooting, the film followed on the heels of John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood a surprise low-budget smash, Menace II Society also arrived amidst a wave of oft-gratuitous poverty porn, haphazardly written sub– Spike Lee dramas like Sugar Hill, Above the Rim, and Singleton’s own Poetic Justice, all later parodied in the Wayans brothers’ Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Menace II Society, the directorial debut of brothers Albert and Allen Hughes, turns twenty-five this week, and it’s one of those films that suffers in the retrospective critical mind for the company it keeps.