DEAD PRESIDENTS
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1995 Ben Hoffman
Although the movie's story is hardly new, it still is able to create anger and arouse emotions. It is about Vietnam and it is about the Black situation told with a straightforward inevitability. We can see it all coming.
We have a Black family living in the Bronx, NY in 1968, with father (James Pickens, Jr.) and mother (Jenifer Lewis), concerned parents sitting around the kitchen table. Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate), eighteen, is announcing that he will not go to college upon graduation from high school. His brother is an attorney. Anthony says he is joining the Marines along with his two best friends, Skip, (Chris Tucker) and Jose (Freddy Rodriguez). In addition to his family whom he will be leaving, he also leaves his girl friend, Juanita, (Rose Jackson).
In the Marines, he and his friends are sent to Vietnam where they find themselves placed on reconnaissance patrol, about as dangerous as missions can get. While the war pictures are like those we have seen many times before in other films, it serves to remind us of what it was like (as much as a movie can do) and also serves to show us how heroically Anthony performs under fire. A few months after his arrival in Vietnam he learns that he has become a father; Juanita has given birth to a baby girl.
Fast forward to 1972 and Anthony, with sergeant stripes, returns home only to find that not only is he not greeted as a hero, but he is berated for having fought "the White man's war," and that he cannot even get a job that will support his family. Black revolutionaries urge him to join with them but he does not see that as a solution.
Juanita, meanwhile, keeps harassing him to do something to change their financial situation. In desperation, he and friends decide to do a heist of an armored truck that picks up "dead presidents" at the Post Office to take to Washington DC for burning. For those (like me) to whom the term is new, it refers to the pictures of Washington, Lincoln, etc. on our paper money. Despite his upbringing he succumbs to the temptation to turn his life around with this one robbery ... which it does.
The cast is uniformly excellent.
Directed by the fraternal twins, The Hughes Brothers, (Allen and Albert) from some real life events.
2.5 Bytes
4 Bytes = Superb
3 Bytes = Too good to be missed.
2 Bytes = So so.
1 Byte = Save your money.
-- Ben Hoffman
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