New Jack City (DVD)

Where survival depends on friends, trust, and power…an organized crime family out to run this city is up against cops who know its streets.

New Jack City is a great gangster movie and a great action movie that somehow never manages to be a Great Movie. What it lacks in skill and experience it more than makes up for in energy and sheer audacity—it pulses and grooves, burns and explodes; in its own way, it's a kind of modern classic. The movie is nothing but rough edges, but it's those rough edges that make it work.

What's best about the film is that it never forgets that it is one; that is, it functions first and foremost as a gangster-action movie before getting bogged down in self-serious "messaging." Yes, the messages are there—crime doesn't pay, drugs kill—but they come out of the filmic conventions that New Jack City embraces.

We get all of the cop movie clichés: the incompatible cops forced to be partners; the police captain screaming about pressure from the mayor; bad-guy-speechifying; climactic shoot-outs—they're all present and accounted for. That's not to say the movie isn't heavy handed in its own Importance at times (it is; especially some of the Chris Rock material—dig that crack pipe/American flag shot), just that it doesn't necessarily seek to be more than it is: a hip, funky, violent and super-charged gangster flick with some Big Ideas.