DEAD PRESIDENTS

dMYD DVD

Starring Larenz Tate

Bit in a Car

M

Because Hollywood still hates black people it’s tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that’s right on time, it’s tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky.

No wait.

Because Hollywood still hates black people it’s tricky to find a decent performance from a black actor in a worthy drama, let alone a God’s honest action movie with twitching and screaming and guns. It’s no fault of the actors and actresses, just a dearth of decent scripts, gung-ho directors and good old-fashioned courage on the parts of studio executives, or the complex algorithms that seem to have replaced them this century. Give me a black action hero that’s not Will Smith and I’ll show you a sidekick, a hacker, a bystander or villain, anything but a decent black guy fronting a big-budget movie. Where’s the Nick Fury film? How badly did Snakes On A Plane fail? Have you ever seen Morgan Freeman dropkick a German terrorist? It’s still a problem, but back in the nineties a pair of brothers in both senses of the word decided they’d had enough, they were going to make an action movie about black people, and how much it can suck to be a black person, and fuck the world. They sort of failed. Have you ever heard of Dead Presidents?

It’s good, but it’s only good, and it’s weird. Essentially one long build up to an explosively messy robbery climax, it spends most of the film detailing the life and times of Anthony Curtis, a good boy from the bad side of town whose experiences in Vietnam sour his views on the American Dream. No cliché’s left unblurted as he faces drugs, pimps and child support on his road downwards, culminating in the afore mentioned robbery where tits fly up in the air and everything goes to hell. The problem’s one of structure and tone; there’s too much history and not enough action, whilst the overall attempt to fuse real-life frustrations and issues with the overblown camerawork and choreography of a Die Hard film doesn’t really work, like Bruce Willis opening up about his problems with the economy while he pulls glass out of his feet. What saves the piece and makes it worth a look-ins are the actors and actresses, wading through the superficiality of the style with believable performances and characters you can invest in, with Larenz Tate in particular sticking out as Anthony, a bundle of apple-pie turned slowly into a whiskey sodden bag of mess. The sad fact remains that it’s hard to find populist action flicks like this with credible black performances – studios still aren’t willing to take the chance on a couple of black guys in the cast, let alone sticking one up front and hoping for a box office return. The end result is that watching something like Dead Presidents leaves you with a weird feeling in your head, an appreciation of the performances you’re seeing because they’re good, but also because you so rarely see them; a group of great black actors riffing and working through a passable action script. And one of them’s Chris Tucker! And he’s good! It’s the end of the WORLD!