Presidentes muertos

I really enjoyed this movie. Everyone in it did an excellent job and it was very gripping. It keeps you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. Larenz Tate, in his best role ever, plays Anthony Curtis, a young black man from late 1960's The Bronx, who is just a regular guy who hangs out with his friends played by Chris Tucker also in his best role ever as Skip, and Freddy Rodriguez as Jose. Shortly after graduation from high school, Anthony decides he doesn't want to follow his big brother's path of going to college but instead, joining the Marine Corps and fight for his country. Shortly thereafter, we are taken to Vietnam with the boys and we meet some other interesting characters, one of them a psychotic preacher, Cleon, played by Bokeem Woodbine,and the Vietnam sequences are executed very realistically and are very bloody. After a while, we are taken back to the boogie down Bronx, where Anthony upon returning to the old neighborhood after four years,realizes that things are even worse than before, and everyone, including his pre-Vietnam girlfriend, Juanita, all have taken their lives in a different direction. Anthony is now a father, and cannot find a job anywhere and realizes that his own country has turned his back on him and many young black veterans from 'Nam, including his old boys Skip and Jose. We also meet Kirby, played by Keith David, a once cold and ruthless hustler, who has now left the life because the corruption of the city has forced him to quit his old habits, and Juanita's sister Delilah, played by N'Bushe Wright, who is an activist with the Black Panthers. Pretty soon all of these characters, save Juanita, fed up with their lives and their situation, get together to plan a stickup on an armored truck that is making a pickup of old dollar bills and is taking them to a location in Washington to burn them. The stickup sequence is very well made, but of course, bloody. This movie is filled with great performances, the best coming from Larenz Tate, Bokeem Woodbine and Keith David, heart-pounding action and good dialogue. A Hughes Brothers' classic. 9.5 out of 10.

For all those who liked the movie "Menace 2 Society",you are going to love this one. This movie features the star from Menace to Society "Larenz Tate" and the well known "Chris Tucker". This is a very violent movie and have a few very gory scenes of the Vietnam war,but that is okay because this movie really shows how difficult it must have been for a black man growing up in the Bronx in the 60's.And it shows how life is for him and his friends after coming home from the Vietnam war. The language in this movie is of course very tough and rough and I could actually count the f-word 247 times in this movie and that speaks for it's self.

This is an extremely well made movie that really shows the reality of how hard the world can be for some people.

I advice everybody to go out and pick up this movie, because it is a story that you got to hear.

Opening in 1969, in the South Bronx, we are introduced to protagonist Anthony Curtis and his friends who are talking about what they will do after they finish school. Anthony decides to sign up for service in the US Marines. While there he fights alongside some of his old friends and makes new ones. After four years serving his country he returns home and discovers life isn't easy for a young black man during an economic downturn. He gets a job but it doesn't pay much; his girlfriend, and mother of his child, is getting money from a pimp and his girlfriend's sister is in a radical militant group. When he loses his job he and his friends work with a local criminal to make one big score... to rob an armoured car taking used currency to be incinerated.

When I sat down to watch this I was expecting a fairly conventional heist movie; that is certainly what the DVD box implied... in fact that is only a very small part of the film. Rather than the conventional heist movie where the first half is the planning before the execution this is about the events that led a promising young man to turn crime. The early scenes serve to introduce us to Anthony and his friends; he clearly isn't a saint as we see him working for a local crook but he still volunteers and ends up fighting in Vietnam where he sees some very unpleasant things. The scenes set during the war are in turns exciting and disturbing but not entirely without humour. Back in the US the film captures the poverty of Bronx where there are few real opportunities for most people; and while not justifying it explains why some turn to crime or radicalism. When we finally get to the robbery it is well handled; exciting without being glamourous. The cast does a fine job; most notably Larenz Tate who excels as Anthony and Chris Tucker who brings humour to the proceedings, as his friend Skip, without going too far and feeling out of place. Overall I'd definitely recommend this; just don't expect a traditional crime/heist movie.

Gripping, poignant story about a young black man growing up in the 1960s Bronx whose parents groom him to follow in the footsteps of his college grad older brother. He has his own plans however, and enlists in the Marine Corps where he survives four years of brutal warfare in Vietnam. He returns home to try and make a new life for himself, but a struggling economy and lack of formal education gradually draw him into a life of crime. An effective portrayal of black involvement in Vietnam, with good performances, powerful scenes, and shockingly graphic violence. Tate is commanding in the lead, and Tucker a real surprise as his drug-addicted pal. Not for all tastes, but well-crafted and well-made. ***

Dead Presidents hammers home its point in its final scene, a quite brilliant and excruciating in its execution scene in the sense we may want these characters to get away with what they're doing. The scene is a heist, created between a handful of people who have come to know each other through the years and we have come to understand their predicaments. The finale sums up the sad, sad desperation some of the characters have had to resort to given their life and what has happened to them and captures how hard the times get when they get hard in the first place.

Dead Presidents is a crime drama; a social commentary and a war film all wrapped up in one. But this genre hybridity does not work against the film as much as it does compliment the epic feeling that we get when we recognise these characters have covered quite a fair distance. The film is Boyz in the Hood; Taxi Driver; Platoon and finishes it all off with a shoot out alá shortly after the robbery in Michael Mann's 1995 film 'Heat'. The finale stands out due to its jarring slow motion and attention to detail in how they have to go about their plan in brutal, violent, realistic detail – each person is positioned and attacks a victim with a certain weapon in a certain way and focuses on a certain part of the victim. The shootout stands out due to its inclusion in what has been, so far, a film that avoids massive shoot outs and lashings of violence in a steady and careful study of an African-America man in a crisis.

The study behind Dead Presidents is intriguing and it's a study of maturity and coming to terms with responsibility. The film has its characters eventually resort to particularly desperate measures in order to merely live but does a good job in not glamorising these means. The primary focus here is the character of Anthony Curtis (Tate), a young African-American in the late sixties hanging around with his other young friends Jose (Rodríguez) and Skip (Tucker) all of whom are about to finish their education and hopefully enter some sort of employment. The setting up of the film is unspectacular but deliberately so; the kids hang out, get high and attend parties. But it is two things that click lead Anthony into his coming of age tale; they are the impregnation of Juanita (Jackson) and the volunteering to go to Vietnam to fight the cause for America in the war.

These two events will shape the character upon his arrival back to The States and it's through the pathetic, immature activities that occur at the very beginning that we will get a feel for how far Anthony has come along as a human being when the going really gets tough later on before, as I said, desperation kicks in. These tough times revolve around balancing a family that he has created as well as dealing with his Vietnam experiences in which he witnessed all the atrocities you'd associate with the war.

The film's opening third is teasing just as it is entertaining. It threatens to head down a route of crime complete with African-American gangsters hanging out in pool halls, taking rides with one another and getting into scraps; be it with one another over a hustle or Kirby (David), perhaps the fiercest criminal of this opening third, battering someone of a third party nature with his prosthetic leg because they owe him money. But the film never becomes stonewall in its genre and doesn't resort to clichés. It presents Anthony with a series of choices at a delicate time in his life but they are little choices such as 'Does he take the potentially ominous ride with Kirby into the unknown?' as Kirby goes to settle a score and how does he react to first seeing a gun and the potential danger that could spawn.

These are choices and scenarios that will prepare Anthony for larger, more important decisions. The scenes and scenarios are nothing we haven't seen before in the respective genre but they're still required for Anthony's maturing process. Once in the military, the film again threatens to break into genre and Anthony is faced once again with choices to do with whether he excepts the Euthanasia plea from a dying soldier – guns and death and general darkness remain in his life and are the subject of a lot of his life experiences. But it's when Anthony returns to New York that a study kicks in. As a character, he has matured through experience and cannot seem to get on with his girlfriend Juanita who's now a mother after his tours of duty. The film feeds off Vietnam as a war which disables its lone individual from re-fitting into society in the snug, immature manner in which he could prior to the event.

Dead Presidents contains a fair number of good scenes and its reference to Taxi Driver as a study of America more observant and concerned with what's going on in a small, Asian country many miles away when home and its own people are in an equally nasty mess (New York, yet again) is interesting. Anthony's struggles with employment and family life as well as the pimp that helps out with money and just wants to be friends acts as a highlight that he cannot even get re-acquainted all too easily, no matter how criminally minded the person is and no matter how much they might have had in common had they met prior one of them going off and fighting for one's country.