New Jack City

1991 "They're a new breed of gangster. The new public enemy. The new family of crime."
6.6| 1h37m| R| en| More Info
Released: 08 March 1991 Released
Producted By: Warner Bros. Pictures
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

A gangster, Nino, is in the Cash Money Brothers, making a million dollars every week selling crack. A cop, Scotty, discovers that the only way to infiltrate the gang is to become a dealer himself.

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Reviews

GamerTab That was an excellent one.
SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.
Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Ross622 This movie is unlike any other gangster movie that I have ever seen and is arguably one of the best of all time, and it's very hard to believe that this is a directorial debut and it is also one of the best debuts I've ever seen. The movie chronicles the career of a gangster named Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) who is a very ruthless gangster who will do anything necessary to make money even if it's illegal with the help of his trusted cohorts Gee Money (Allen Payne) and Kareem Akbar (Christopher Williams). Brown is also under investigation by detectives Scottie Appleton (Ice-T) and Detective Stone (Mario Van Peebles, who also directed this movie) who also have an informant named Pookie (Chris Rock). It is funny to me but prior to watching this movie I never thought of ever seeing Wesley Snipes as a gangster, and Chris Rock in a dramatic role altogether but in their cases their performances exceeded my own expectations, but Ice-T i'm used to playing as a cop because of his work on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit". Everything in this movie is nearly flawless, but there was one minor problem that I had which was that the songs about "New Jack City" go on and on and can get pretty annoying after a while of hearing them but everything else including the Wesley Snipes performance, and the visionary direction of Mario Van Peebles struck the right chords in telling a story set in the suburbs of New York City, telling a pure and realistic message about what drugs can do to people on the streets and how harmful they can be, which is a reason why more people should watch this movie to learn about the harmful effects of drug addiction. This is one of the 10 best and most memorable movies of 1991.
FlashCallahan Nino Brown, a small time drug dealer, is convinced by one of his fellow thugs that the wave of the future is in the cocaine derivative, crack. Brown sees potential in crack and sets out to establish himself as chief kingpin by killing off his rivals and even going as far as to take over a whole apartment complex. Out to stop him are undercover cops Scottie Appleton and Nick Paretti. Appleton especially wants to get Nino because of the fact that he may have murdered his mother as part of a gang initiation. Also involved is Pookie, a former crack head who wants to bring down Nino as well......This film is ground breaking for one simple reason, it opened the door for gangster rappers/hip hop stars to become lucrative. So if it wasn't for this movie, Trespass, Juice, Above The Rim, and Menace II Society, probably wouldn't exist.It also shows that Snipes wasn't always an action star. Before Passenger 57 came to fruition, he was a scary screen presence, as this proves.But just as Scarface has been misunderstood (seen here ironically), the film doesn't show how powerful Drug Lords are, it clearly shows how greedy, how selfish, and how lonely they become, the more money they have.After all, when is enough enough?Peebles is an adequate director, but he does sometimes ask the audience to swallow some huge coincidences, and the police are not very well fleshed out, so the focus is on Brown and the Cash Money crew, so thank goodness that they are so entertaining.Rock shows up as the addict, and may as well be wearing a t-shirt saying 'this is what drugs will do to you' as he's only there as a metaphor for addiction.But all in all, it's a very watchable, very early nineties, piece of exploitation.
Patrick Lockett This movie made no sense it was all over the place. I know it's an older movie which is why I'm giving it some leeway here but all in all it still made cops look like idiots and dumb crooks look like geniuses. There were many times they could have arrested Nino or at least had his drug empire crumble around him. Entertaining but made no sense. There were some good performances by Chris Rock as a junkie and then redeeming himself as an informant, this movie would have been a lot better had they kept Pookie alive and had this movie a bit more of of a road to redemption for him. In the end though while this movie has some entertaining values in the end it just failed to meet expectations.
Leigh Burne I don't normally write reviews, but this film annoyed me so much I felt compelled to put some of my opinions forward.Firstly, the script. I really couldn't get over how terrible it was, given the good reviews I'd read before watching the film. Don't get me wrong, I like a brainless, thoughtless actioner as much as anyone, maybe more, but I at least want my action scenes to be strung together with some kind of purpose. Here, stuff just happened. The film would be going in one direction and then, with the flick of a switch, that idea would be abandoned and we'd go after something else. The end in particular suffered from this problem, and left me thinking, "WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!"Another massive problem I had was with the acting. I'm sure Ice-T has plenty of fans out there, but I couldn't even put up with how bad his acting was in this. It was just atrocious. I wasn't even able to enjoy it in an amused way, because I really got the impression he thought he was being cool. Judd Nelson as his partner also annoyed me, because he seemed to be in the film for no reason other than to have a white guy in the cast. Most of the time he said and did nothing, and in the one scene where he actually takes part in a conversation, I couldn't help but feel that whatever he was saying was irrelevant.The film did, however, have one saving grace - Wesley Snipes. As bad as everything else was, Snipes was really having fun here, and it shows. Like a black Tony Montana, he chews up every scene he's in, (mostly) overcoming the lame script he has to work with. Sadly though, it's not enough to save what was otherwise a very long 90 minutes. Check it out for Snipes, but don't necessarily expect to come away smiling.