Let me just come out and say it: I utterly and totally loathed Men­ace II Soci­ety. The Dork Report’s 1/2 star rat­ing is reserved for true cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity, movies that I think the world would have been a bet­ter place had they not been made (zero stars are for those rare and spe­cial cases, beyond the pale, where bad trans­mutes into good, like the per­versely enjoy­able Plan 9 From Outer Space — read The Dork Report review). Of course, I’m a rel­a­tively priv­i­leged white boy from sub­ur­bia, so it’s going to be tricky for me to explain my pas­sion­ately neg­a­tive reac­tion to a movie about African Amer­i­cans trapped in racist, drug-infested Watts, South Cen­tral Los Ange­les. The cheap way out would be to claim I’m not the tar­get audi­ence, but that itself would be a kind of racist copout.

The best way to explain how I feel about this movie is to com­pare it to two of the best works of fic­tion I’ve ever seen: Do the Right Thing (1989) and The Wire (2002–08). Men­ace II Soci­ety opens with stock footage of 1965 Watts riots, and then fast-forwards to Watts in 1993. It’s a cheap and crass stab at social rel­e­vance that only movies like Spike Lee’s mas­ter­piece Do the Right Thing have earned. I don’t know how much fac­tual or bio­graph­i­cal truth is in Men­ace II Soci­ety, but every­thing that fol­lows strikes me as exploita­tion; which is to say, the worst, most sen­sa­tion­al­ized depic­tions of drug cul­ture dra­ma­tized to scare the bejeezus out of sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized cin­ema goers. Do the Right Thing pre­sented one of the most com­plex views of racial ten­sion ever seen in the movies, but Men­ace II Soci­ety is a mere low­lights reel of relent­less vio­lence and deprav­ity that seemed to me to be racist itself. Caine (Tyrin Turner), O-Dog (Larenze Tate), and Tat (Samuel L. Jack­son), not a sin­gle char­ac­ter can speak a sin­gle sen­tence with­out at least three n-words and two f-bombs.

The Wire is one of the only TV series to approach the level of lit­er­a­ture, and like Do the Right Thing it counts race among its many deep themes. Many of its char­ac­ters are also under­priv­i­leged African Amer­i­cans on the wrong side of the law. But not once did I ever sense The Wire was exploita­tive or sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic in any way. Men­ace II Soci­ety barely deserves to be men­tioned in the same para­graph as The Wire, but I did note a very sim­i­lar scene in both: in the sec­ond sea­son of The Wire, Bodie and Sham­rock take a rare road trip out of Bal­ti­more and, unable to find any hip-hop on the radio, instead find them­selves lis­ten­ing to NPR’s A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion in baf­fled silence. Like­wise, the best scene in Men­ace II Soci­ety is of an African Amer­i­can fam­ily at home on Christ­mas Eve watch­ing It’s a Won­der­ful Life, and utterly unable to relate to or derive any plea­sure from it.

Men­ace II Soci­ety (1993, New Line Cin­ema) is the debut film from twin broth­ers Albert and Allen Hughes, who would later go on to direct From Hell (2001), and com­pletely miss the point of the source mate­r­ial: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel. In direct con­trast to John Singleton’s sim­ply, clas­si­cally shot Boyz n the Hood (read The Dork Report review), Men­ace II Soci­ety is a slickly pol­ished pro­duc­tion (which, I believe, only con­tributes to its glam­or­iza­tion of the thug gangsta lifestyle). But it’s a clumsy film in other ways, with ter­ri­ble voiceover nar­ra­tion stu­pidly telling instead of show­ing. But it pays off in the end with the real­iza­tion of the only inter­est­ing device of the film: it’s nar­rated by a dead man.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.