SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Gideon24 Dead Presidents is a gritty 1995 urban drama that tries to tell an epic story on a very intimate canvas, but only partially succeeds.The film stars Larenz Tate as Anthony Curtis, an aimless youth who is working for a local numbers runner (Keith David), who upsets his family when, instead of going to college, decides to enter the military and gets sent to Vietnam. The meat of the film focuses on his return from Vietnam where he learns he has a daughter he knew nothing about, has no way to support her, and learns that his daughter and his Baby Mama (Rose Jackson) have been taken care of by a slimy pimp (Clifton Powell). When the nothing job he gets with a butcher turns out to be insufficient to support his daughter and the child that's on the way, he ends up turning to crime.The Hughes Brothers, who were much more successful with Menace II Society, give us a long, rambling film that suffers primarily due to an overblown and preachy screenplay. The section of the film where Anthony is in Vietnam is way too long and ends just in time for us to continue caring what happens.Tate's baby-faced sincerity goes a long way in making us care about Anthony and both David and Powell make the most of the meaty roles they've been given. Chris Tucker is also effective as Anthony's junkie friend who contracted Agent Orange in Vietnam and N'Bushe Wright as Jackson's sister, who is instrumental in Anthony's descent into a life of crime.The movie is way too long, but Tate's solid on screen charisma does help to sustain interest for the most part.

non_sportcardandy That's the main point that stood out for me in this movie.Still a teenager the draft called me and some of my homies,some of them went to Nam.First and second hand I've known the vast majority of persons that went there went through changes.The brutality in this movie reflected some of the experiences I heard about.Many men don't recover from it,a lot are around us and are misunderstood.Some persons may have a different opinion about war after viewing this movie.That was the strong point for me about this movie.This review comes from a person that might of talked about World War II with their Uncle but his body was never sent back.

johnnyboyz 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.

somehope ... that the Hughes Bros. apologized for this film because they thought they messed it or something. They didn't. The film shows a familiar trail: innocence of friendship before Vietnam, the war itself, and then the return home from war where you were once rewarded for killing and now you're trapped barely making ends meet with a family to support.Larenz Tate, whose character was full of hate in "Menance II Society", here shows how a good kid can turn into a bad man and shows me, which is very important, why he changed into a criminal. For me, O-Dogg was a modern day Clockwork Orange. That was fine for Menance because it was a shot of gangsta energy from debut directors. Anthony Curtis' story is more textured and proves Tate can tone down anger to show the humanity behind it.'No Viet Cong called me a n----r," M. Ali said. And here, in this film, I can see through the H. brothers' direction and Tate's acting, performance a strong argument againist why anyone, especially, the black man (and woman) got screwed over in Vietnam to support Ali's statement.I'm rambling, but see it for yourself as an edit changes Curtis from running home over fences to a solider running over the Vietnam jungle, and then later as a pimp, who has being doing Curtis' wife, pushes him down the stairs. In the 80's movies, Rambo was a hermit with a lot of anger. Curtis lived in a much more real world, and would have done what Curtis did.