a5c7b9f00b A crime lord ascends to power and becomes megalomaniacal while a maverick police detective vows to stop him. A modern-day crime epic focusing on the efforts of two unorthodox police officers to bring down a drug gang at the height of New York City&#39;s crack cocaine epidemic of 10 years ago. The film also chronicles the rise and fall of Nino Brown, the antagonist of the film, in a light study of drug proliferation and its effects on poor neighborhoods. As numerous attempts to break the control of the gang fail and violence begins to escalate, how far will the police go to catch Nino Brown? This depiction of war on drugs in &quot;New Jack City&quot; is pretty good. I like how they modernized a story which we have all heard or seen before in films suchScarface. Its about a drug lord Nino Brown (Snipes) who takes over new jack city&#39;s drug enterprise, meanwhile director plays a cop who hires street cops Ice-T and Judd nelson to infiltrate his family and bring him down. Wesley Snipes is great in this role, maybe one of his best performances yet, I have never seen him so powerful. Ice-T was average, his performances are sort of typical to me, he was not bad though. I liked Allen Payne in a roleNino&#39;s childhood friend who gives him the idea to start selling crack instead of coke. Bill Cobbs was funny to seea stuttering gangster. Chris Rock was also good and pretty funny in his rolea dealer turned &quot;crackhead&quot; named Pookie. I thought Judd nelson was a bit of a joke, didn&#39;t really fit in and Mario Van Peebles is not the greatest actor, his acting was a bit weak. The direction in the film is pretty good, i liked Van Peebles&#39; style, although I have heard many bad things about his other films. I thought Thomas lee Wright and Barry Michael Cooper&#39;s(Above the rim) script was one of the highlights, very good dialogues and sequence of events, great script. The story, although not extremely original, works in this film, and the acting is good for the most part, direction kept it interesting. 8/10 Van Peebles directs a great cast in this detached-from-reality film about a truly evil drug-lord with a head for business and murder (Snipes), and a tough, street-wise pair of cops (Ice-T and Judd Nelson) hell-bent on bringing him down. The message is an important one - slogans are not going to win the war on drugs, and the way the message is carried in the film is more subtle than you might expect. The end of the film makes the point very clear, and I won&#39;t discuss it because I do not write spoilers. Like many of the more intelligent films made in the early 1990s, New Jack City is also an indictment of the euphoria of the Reagan years - telling the true story of what that time was like for those living from paycheck to paycheck, or trying to live without one, and dealing with the invisible &quot;war on drugs&quot; which had little to no effect on anybody in our inner-city neighborhoods.<br/><br/>Snipes, Ice-T, Allen Payne and Chris Rock give stand-out performances, and the rest of the cast provide excellent support. The film also stars New York City, and definitely has an NYC flavor (seasoned with more than a pinch of Hollywood). The cinematography is a little breathless - not unusual for the genre but in this case a bit extreme. The script is good, but perhaps too dense with rich plot details. And the editing provides a few pacing problems toward the middle of the film which, combined with the over-abundance of subplots, detract from the development of the main themes. The soundtrack is excellent - including a nice mix of hip-hop, rap, contemporary soul, and dance music - all blended nicely with the imagery of the film. Van Peebles style is well developed in this film, but I felt that some aspects of the plot were a little too outrageous for the seriousness of the film&#39;s message, and I fear that the message may have been lost on many of the film&#39;s viewers.<br/><br/>Overall, this is a good film. Entertaining and thoughtful, but definitely not for everybody. The film's flamboyant portrait of Nino may be stereotypical, but Mr. Snipes makes it chilling.
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