Dead Presidents
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Movie Reviews of Dead Presidents
Movie Review: EXCELLENT EXCELLENT EXCELLENT!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Dead Presidents is an excellent movie! Larenz Tate was great in every aspect! From the beginning to end this movie kept you interested in the lives of each character. I believe this was a good depiction of what young men had to deal with back in the 1960's! Chris Tucker was hilarious as usual, and Larenz was awesome!Movie Review: DON'T BELIEVE THE BAD HYPE
Summary: 5 Stars
Dead Presidents is a cool movie, I don't what the other reviewers were watching. It has a compelling story, great actors, and it's filmed very artistically. Every actor in this film did a great job bringing their characters to life. This film keeps you entertained, there is not one dull moment. After following the story, you want to see them pull off the heist and it's gripping to the very end, I won't spoil the ending..........Movie Review: Really disappointing.
Summary: 2 Stars
I gave an extra star for Keith David's performance, which was as good as ever. Only he could play that type of character: a crippled-but-tough, nice-but-menacing father figure.The other charcters, though, were horrible. There was nothing remarkable about any of the other performances. They were all shallow, stereotypical, and pointless.
The Vietnam segment was ludicrous. I don't have a to see a preacher's son rip the head off of a dead Vietnamese soldier to know that what my dad (who actually was a U.S. Marine in Vietnam fom '65 to '66, and again in 1968) went through was hell.
The very notion of a pot-head like Chris Tucker's character being a member of a Recon team is absurd. Whether it's Battalion or Force Recon, you have to be one of the smartest, most capable Marines out there to get in. It was an insult what they showed in the movie.
At the end, we were supposed to feel sorry for Tate's character and agree with him about what he did for his country.
I personally ended up siding with the Judge (Martin Sheen). He had some very good points, except for Vietnam not being a "real war."
Almost all of the violence was overdone and gory just for the sake of being gory.
I would recommend against either renting or buying this movie. Or if you do, get it for Keith David's performance alone.
Movie Review: horrible!
Summary: 1 Stars
after watching meanace 2 society, i had big expectations for this movie. i was totally dissapointed. i really don't know what else to say about this movie. the plot wasn't anything great, and the actors did an ok job. but for some reason, the movie just didn't live up to any expectations. i do not recomend this movie to ANYONE. watch meanace 2 society. much better. peace....Movie Review: The Hughes Brothers do it-- and do it well-- again
Summary: 4 Stars
What do you do when your debut film is one of the top 100 movies of all time? This was the predicament the Hughes brothers faced after releasing 1993's stunning _Menace II Society_. My guess is they wanted to get away from what they were doing while still preserving the Highes style that made _Menace_ such a fantastic film, so they decided to do a flick about Black Americans' involvement in Vietnam, and its fallout. (Does anyone remember if this was based on a true story? I seem to recall hearing that...) More than anything, Dead Presidents suffered from awful marketing. Everyone flocked to the film expecting the whole thing to be about a bank heist, and instead they were treated to the story of Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate, the actor who made O-Dog so memorable in _Menace_) and two of his high school friends in the late sixties. Fully three-quarters of this movie is setup, if you go in thinking it's about the bank heist, and I can see why a lot of people ended up panning this. However, if you realize it's a story about one person growing up, coming of age in the middle of the jungle, and his attempted reintegration into society, it suddenly gets a whole lot better. Add an ensemble cast worthy of many praises (including a young, hip, and very funny Chris Tucker as Curtis' best friend, N'Bushe Wright as his sister-in-law, and the brilliant Keith David as Kirby, the guy who originally gets Curtis involved in crime while still in high school), and it becomes an absorbing, painful meditation on life during wartime.
There are still some bad things about Dead Presidents, the main one being that the Hughes Brothers didn't go anywhere near far enough away from Menace to make this into a film with its own separate identity; in some cases, they might have been using the same sets, the same props, and the same dialogue. If you've never seen Menace, it probably comes off just as fresh and original as it did there, but those who compare the two (and saw them in order of release) will probably end up finding Menace the better film. One also wonders if the Hughes brothers didn't use the Vietnam footage as an excuse for some extra gratuitous violence; the more Vietnam war films we get, the more brutal the footage becomes. We KNOW war is hell, folks, and there's something to be said for the power of suggestion. Instead, Al and Al give us every gory, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, detail.
Still, I'd be wrong to not recommend this. It's good, solid work. But if you haven't encountered the Hughes brothers yet, I cannot urge you enough to go, now, today, and rent a copy of Menace II Society.