This was such a great film! I mean, sure, it was problematic and violent and the profanity was probably far too excessive for most people, but the point is, the Hughes brothers made a powerful film with Menace II Society. Based on its subject, there will undoubtedly be comparisons drawn between Menace and Boyz N the Hood. So, I’ll go ahead and start them off by saying that the movie seemed to begin where Boyz leaves off. Rather than telling the story of how a people struggle to avoid becoming corrupted and destroyed by the thug-life, it tells the latter half of the story: what life is like after it has been corrupted and destroyed by thug-life.
The messages in the movie were as clear as those from the opening scene of School Daze (“WAKE UP!!!”) or the opening shot of Boyz (the stop sign)—they were blatantly obvious. To start with, the protagonist’s name: Caine. This not-to-subtle biblical reference lets us know that the main character will be faced with the threat of killing his “brother.” While in the Bible, this meant blood brother, in Menace, it meant his fellow African American brothers.
The movie was good in that it dealt with most of the problems of black American youth today. While the blaxploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s did this as well, they were much more focused on fantasy, whereas the gangsta films like Menace are very reality-based. In this film, we see the results of single parenthood, of lack of positive male role models, of drugs, of violence, of black-on-black violence, of religious conflicts, of the inability for most youths to escape the ghetto. The film takes a dozen themes that could easily be their own movie and roles them into one production.
The one message that I didn’t get from the film was what exactly the end of the movie meant. I mean, I loved the whole: “Caine, do you care if you live or die?” thing, because that is so relevant to the mentality of today’s black youth. They spend their whole lives not knowing if they really care about life, and then, they realize they do, but it’s too late. That was a powerful message that sank in deep and touched the film’s viewers. But the thing that I wasn’t too fond of was the fact that the only main charcter left at the end of the movie (other than Jada Pinkett) was O-Dog. I see how it makes sense that the good guys shouldn’t necessarily win, because that is real. But why have only O-Dog live? I mean, he was the worst of the worst: ruthless, merciless, remorseless. The Muslim friend bites it after he convinces Caine to change his lifestyle. Caine dies after deciding to make a better life for himself, his future wife, and his future kid. Yet O-Dog survives, presumably to retaliate at some point in the near future and, also presumably, to get capped right afterwards as a retaliation for his retaliation. So, the cycle continues...
So, I wonder what the point is. I think that the Hughes brothers were trying to show how the gangsta life really is and what it can do to one’s life. I think that they were trying to show that one’s past will eventually catch up with a person and that one can’t escape their sin. But, it just seemed like a very pessimistic outlook on the future with the only survivor being O-Dog. But maybe the Hughes brothers have a pessimistic attitude toward the future of black youth in the ghetto. Maybe those youths do as well. And there are definitely plenty of people who would agree. So, perhaps the Hughes brothers were just speaking the minds of their peers. Either way, they did an excellent job and created a very powerful movie.
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