westen1223 Menace II Society portrays urban hood life during the early 1990's perfectly and outstandingly. Unlike Boyz N the Hood, the film gives us an inner perspective on hood violence and the bloody consequences of certain individuals and may I say, they have done it fantastically. The cast members played their role momentously and their performances were exceptional, particularly Tyrin Turner and Larenz Tate.Although the consistent violent scenes, the movie puts realism in several successful ways and that is why this is one of my favourite films of the 1990's. Powerful and poignant.

powermandan Boyz N the Hood is the quintessential hood film. But Menace II Society is the more violent version of it. Menace II Society deals with less fortunate characters that in Boyz N the Hood. Luckily, they are just as fleshed out.The movie opens up with protagonist and narrator Caine (Tyrin Turner) loitering with his best friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate) and about to buy booze in a convenience store. One thing leads to another and O-Dog brutally kills the owners. The scene is played out perfectly as we feels the shots fired. O-Dog is the most sadistic and violent guy in the hood. Like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas or 2Pac in Juice, there is no beating the psycho known as O-Dog. He is proud of the kill and he flaunts the surveillance tape to their friends. Tate does an awesome job.Caine's mother was a junkie and his father was a drug dealer. He witnessed his mother OD and his father get brutally killed when he was a child. He then goes onto live with his religious and overly- calm grandparents. He witnesses so many violent activities in the streets and partakes in half of them. Throughout the film, we see Caine progress into a more ambitious and less crazy character. He doesn't think too much of cheating on his girlfriend (Jada Picket-Smith) or sticking with his friends if a rival gets in their face. But he feels shock when O-Dog kills the clerk and the he is questioned about a carjacking. It is not easy for him to escape what has consumed himself his whole life.This is an extremely brutal but powerful film. Not everybody has a well-meaning father like Fishburne in Boyz N the Hood. The brutality featured in this helps propel the power that this has. The characters are real and this does an amazing job of showing one's consequences. Caine eventually grows to try to live a better life outside the hood. We sit there wondering if he can. I recommend watching this and Boyz N the Hood. Doesn't matter the order or even if its in the same day. Both show perfectly the effects of living in a ghetto and different home lives.

Steve Pulaski Menace II Society shows growing up in an impoverished urban area plagued by violence by detailing numerous different perspectives; compassion, aggression, resistance, compliance, brute force, contentment, and more. Various scenes in the film, which is largely a string of vignette-style events strung together rather than a fully formed plot, focus on characters discussing their motivations to either combat or work around the violence in their area, with some choosing to try and fight it by contributing to it, and others simply trying to function in a community that is more like a warzone.The Hughes Brothers, Albert and Allen, who directed and co-wrote the film with Tyger Williams, craft their film around two young black teens growing up in South Central Los Angeles. One is Kaydee "Caine" Lawson (Tyrin Turner), who's father was a drug dealer killed when he was only ten, while his mother was a heroin addict who died shortly after. He went on to live with his grandparents, though their strict, moralist attitudes rooted in religion didn't stop Caine from becoming a petty drug dealer like his father. The other young man is Kevin "O-Dog" Anderson, who shows his best friend Caine what he can really do when the two go to a Korean-owned cornerstore to buy malt liquor and the owners watch them suspiciously and nervously walk around the store. After the cashier makes a derogatory comment, O-Dog loses his cool and winds up shooting both the cashier and his wife before robbing the cash register and taking the surveillance tape. Just another day in South Central, it seems.The film winds up showing the day-to-day life of Caine and O-Dog, which involves Caine nearly dying after being shot in a carjacking, as well as petty crime involving cracking cars for insurance money. We also get a glimpse in the life of Ronnie (Jada Pinkett), a single-mother with a young son she is desperately trying to shelter from the bleak environment and unrelenting violence that engulfs the neighborhood. Her character's introduction begins the Hughes brothers' descent into examining different perspectives of the neighborhood.Consider the scene where Caine is playing with Ronnie's young son, who is clearly growing up fast for a five-year-old, as he loves to be able to hold Caine's pistol, drink liquor, and hang out with the crowd of older boys. Ronnie is disgusted by Caine's compliance with allowing her son to hold a pistol and hang with his friends as they sip some of their ostensibly endless supply of malt liquor and smoke marijuana. Caine claims that this is for the young boy's good, as this is a rough and rugged neighborhood that laughs at kids who are kept from witnessing the violence in such a miserable landscape. The Hughes brothers allow you, as a member of the audience, to judge for yourself on both perspectives and hear each of their characters out; it is because of this even-handed approach that we see that Caine's point, while holding weight, also shows the cyclical pattern of young black men getting incarcerated or killed at a young age due to violent crime or the solicitation of drugs, and we understand Ronnie's protectiveness as a parent, but wonder if that approach is also just buying time for another funeral.The Hughes Brothers take a very liberal approach to Menace II Society in terms of crafting its characters. Unlike John Singleton's directorial debut Boyz N The Hood, a film that illustrates how and why you should care about its characters and why they are all smart men stuck in a hopeless situation, Menace II Society never gives you a reason to like Caine and O-Dog. By the conventionality of Hollywood cinema, we, the audience, should detest Caine and O-Dog for their criminal ways and their unconscionable resort to violence and immediate gratification whenever they get the chance. The Hughes Brothers likely feel the same way, but they challenge us to find reasons for us to care about them throughout the course of the film, and see if we can find even some sympathy for their situations.For much of the film, I didn't feel too sympathetic, until the third act, which takes a strikingly raw turn. Granted much of the film is captured with a gritty sense of realism, one doesn't really see the ugliness unfold until the third act, when karmic revenge circumvents and finds its lead characters unprepared to lie in the bed they've made for themselves. Menace II Society's only lacking feature is the Hughes brothers' directorial choices; the camera never seems to stay still, and either finds itself oscillating around the main characters in a 360 degree fashion or loosely tracks its location in a way that sort of oddly details spatial relations between characters and their surroundings when there's really no need to do so.With all that being said, Menace II Society winds up using its narrative and directorial grittiness in a manner that's germane to its illustration of various character perspectives in how to deal with growing up in a tumultuous neighborhood. The end result bears all the pain, immediate gratification, and whirlwind of emotions you'd expect and winds up being one of the strongest dramas I've yet to see that details the hood in a painfully realistic light. Finally, it works to emphasize that while your drug-dealing and violent crime is indeed a menace to society, it's also makes, perhaps equally significant, a menace to yourself.

tavm Okay, after 20 years of reading and hearing about this movie by The Hughes (Albert and Allen) Brothers, I finally watched Meanace II Society on YouTube. Mainly about teen hood Caine (Tyrin Turner) and his life with fellow South Central L.A. pal O-Dog (Larenz Tate), among other events of that time, I found the whole thing a little upsetting with what I've now found out had the most use of the f-word of any of these black movies I've been watching these last few days, not to mention the constant violence. Still, it does get better when Caine's possible girlfriend Ronnie (Jada Pinkett before becoming Mrs. Will Smith) offers a possible out by moving out with her and her son Anthony (Jullian Roy Doster) to Atlanta. But then another girl he fooled around with named Ilena (Erin Leshawn Wiley) tells him she's pregnant and...oh, watch the film if you want to know. In summary, Menace II Society didn't really pick my interest until the last 30 minutes and I started to see it in a whole new light. So on that note, I highly recommend it with reservations.