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Chris Tucker is hilarious in this movie, he has great on screen charisma, and he speaks his lines very fluidly, as if he was improvising. Larenz Tate is great as well, being able to pull off the young version of his character, since he has a boyish face. And Bokeem Woodbine reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson in this movie. The cinematography is also great and so is the acting overall. Like everyone says, its not so much as a heist movie, but a reflection on the hardships of the black individual, such as finding work and drug abuse; after fighting a war that wasnt really meant for them or their country.

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.

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.

"Dead Presidents" is a classic in my book. I could suffice with that statement but I'll add a bit more. It was a well acted and well directed drama that seemed to be funny when it needed to be (thank you Chris Tucker), dramatic when it needed to be, and even violent when it needed to be. Some of, if not most of the violence was pretty graphic--that can be taken as a positive or negative. I'm not perturbed by it, but I can see how some are.

I loved the story. It was simple yet complex. It was really about five years in the life of a young Black man from New York spanning from 1968 to 1973. From his high school years on the streets of the Bronx, to his years in Vietnam, to his return to a family and struggling with life in the world. I think "Dead Presidents" was an excellent production that didn't short change us at all in any aspect.

Albert and Allen Hughes direct, produce and co-write (with Michael Henry Brown) this tale about Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate), a South Bronx boy who goes off to fight in Vietnam, to then return after his tours of duty to find things just aren't the same anymore. The follow up to their incendiary debut, Menace II Society, the Hughes brothers deliver another in your face picture that is quite frankly on a perpetual downer. This is no bad thing, though, as long as you are not looking to be cheered up.

That's Uncle Sam for you! Mean Green.

The pic very much harks back to the glory days of film noir in the 40s and 50s, where some talented film makers began to tell stories of returning war veterans finding what they left behind is now alien to them - with some characters, as is the case here - deeply scarred by their experiences. Add in some gangster elements and the coup de grâce that is the scintillating heist, and clearly the brothers have seen many an old classic film. That the narrative is tried and tested stops the piece hitting greater heights, this in spite of some super acting (especially Tate and the always value for money Keith David) and the hard hitting violence that pierces the senses. Predictable yet potent, and certainly memorable, it's well worth a look for the tough of mind and the classic era film of heart. 7/10