The film gives us an overview of the world and the situation that numerous African Americans have to endure. If you don't live in or near one of these neighborhoods, just turn to the news at 11 to see.The film “Boys in the Hood” happens in Los Angeles, California, and focuses on a set of African American youth that matures together in the same locality. Singleton adroitly lets the emotions wash over the didacticism, his feet placed squarely on direct experience and timeliness. These points, however, touch some raw nerve endings in black America they need to be made. The agenda in this film includes the evils of Eurocentric education, the cultural bias of SAT exams, the importance of condoms, white gentrification of black neighborhoods, black male mistreatment of their women, and so on. His finger-wagging isn't as clumsily intrusive as Robert Townsend's, but it's there. When things get suspenseful, Singleton gets decidedly corny about the editing. A subplot, in which Tre's postgraduate-student mother (Angela Bassett) leaves her kid with his father, is superficially outlined. Ice Cube as the kid who never had, nor even contemplated, a future, is tremendously believable.īut "Boyz," one in a groundswell of rap-culture movies, betrays Singleton's artistic youthfulness. In terms of the movie's uplift-the-race purposes, Fishburne is the finest element (although it doesn't help matters that he owns an enormous Magnum). The best performances come from Fishburne and Ice Cube. The friends are about to experience a gangland tragedy that will test the aforementioned murder stats. But Doughboy (rap singer Ice Cube), who owns a gun, has learned the doomed ways of the street. Ricky (Morris Chestnut), whose girlfriend already has a baby, is applying for an athletic scholarship.
Thanks to his father, Tre (now played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) is still on the straight and narrow. That's why he stays home while his friends are run off to the police station for stealing once again. Tre has the significant advantage of a father (Larry Fishburne) who cares about bringing him up. They don't converse with so much as insult each other. They play football near a body ("Look like Freddy Krueger got him," says one). The kids look at those bloodstains with jaded eyes. Singleton watches violence work on the three friends like a hidden cancer. If anyone gets out of this neighborhood, there's nothing for them anyway.
Reagan-Bush reelection posters stare at alleys full of trash and bloodstains from the latest murder. Adolescents hang rowdily on street corners. A crack-addicted mother offers herself to anyone for another fix. Ten-year-old Tre Styles (Desi Arnez Hines II) and his friends Doughboy and Ricky (Baha Jackson and Donovan McCrary) already know the score in their L.A. In an emotional coming-of-age story, 23-year-old director John Singleton takes this set of facts and runs with it. Most of them will perish at each other's hands. A warning about neglected black men, it will often tear at the heart too - at least, when it doesn't feel like the rap equivalent of a classroom lecture.Īt the beginning, cold statistics slapped on screen tell it all: One out of every 21 black males will die of murder. "Boyz in the Hood" is torn straight from the city section of any major metropolitan newspaper.