I remember when Boyz n the Hood came out that writer/director John Singleton got a lot of praise for the movie, his debut. He would go on to become the youngest director ever nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards that year. As I recall, the movie was praised for, among other things, the timeliness of the message and the raw power of the movie itself. Now, I never got around to seeing it for the same reason that I hadn’t gone on to see a lot of other movies, namely that I didn’t get out as much then as I do now. Honestly, Singleton, who died in 2019, seems to have made other movies that attempted to repeat the success of his debut before gradually fading from the public eye, but I had only ever seen one of his movies before now.
And it was the only Fast and Furious movie to not have Vin Diesel in it…
In 1984, young Tre is sent by his concerned mother (Angela Bassett) to Compton to live with his father Jason “Furious” Styles (Laurence Fishburne, and a more formidable pair of parents I don’t think I could name). Though Furious had Tre when he was only 17, he is bound and determined to be a good father to his son and teach the boy the proper way to be a responsible man. Fast forward to 1991, and Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr) is doing well in school, holding down a job at the local mall, and dating neighbor girl Brandi (Nia Long). However, not everyone is doing well. Tre’s childhood friend Doughboy (Ice Cube) is a member of a gang while Doughboy’s half-brother Ricky (Morris Chestnut) is a promising high school football player who is already himself a father. Doughboy has already been in and out of prison, but Ricky and Tre might both have a way out for themselves.
However, the movie does seem to make it clear even before Gooding appears as the older Tre that the real difference between Tre and the brothers is the presence of Furious in his life, and despite the name, he doesn’t make many points shouting at the top of his lungs. Instead, Furious is more of a solid role model who imparts the lessons of responsible living to his son, and even as shootings and self-hating Black cops make life difficult even for good kids like Tre, explaining how to be a man while also explaining what it means to be Black in 90s America, and a lot of what he says doesn’t sound like it’s likely to be all that different in 2022.
So, I really liked this movie and what it did. Sure, it’s a little odd seeing the likes of Gooding and Cube in a movie like this considering where their acting careers went after this came out, but I did have to wonder about something. On the one hand, it sure did seem like a lot of what I saw were plot and characters beats that I had seen before. On the other, there’s a good chance those plot and story beats came from this movie because, you know, it was a groundbreaking movie in many ways when it came out. Yes, Singleton’s movie can be blatantly obvious at times, such as an opening shot just holding on a “stop” sign, but I still spent a decent amount of time wondering whether the somewhat cliched moments in the movie were cliched when it came out, and the truth is, there’s no real way for me to know at this point without doing a lot of research, I suspect.
Regardless, this one was a solid movie, and it really helped that the cast, especially Fishburne, really grounded the movie with great performances. Fishburne’s Furious, though not a perfect man in some respects, is the moral voice for the movie, and Fishburne gives the movie the required gravitas to pull it off. Likewise, Gooding, Cube, Chestnut, and Long make credible young people trying to find their way in a world that is set against them for a wide variety of reasons, most notably because of their race. Singleton may not have ever matched the success he had here, but this one movie is a testament to the talent he had that just perhaps never again matched his first effort.
Grade: A-
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