Dead Presidents ** (1995, Larenz Tate, Keith David, Chris Tucker, Freddy Rodriguez) – Classic Movie Review 3814

Producer-directors Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes’s 1995 action crime thriller is set in The Bronx in the late Sixties. Three African American Vietnam veterans, ignored and neglected by society, plan to steal withdrawn dollar bills in a risky heist on a security van. And it all goes spectacularly wrong, as it always looked as though it would.

The Hughes (Menace II Society) Twins’ downbeat, character-driven, socially aware crime melodrama with a conscience doesn’t really deliver on either the violent action or compassionate human fronts. But it remains intelligent and bracing, with some remarkable sequences (especially the flashbacks to the troubled hero Larenz Tate’s tour of duty in Vietnam) and performances.

The direction, cinematography (Lisa Rinzler), score(Danny Elfman) and acting are pretty special and eye-catching, too. So it is a shame it isn’t a better film, and that it just misses the spot. In the end, you just want to turn away from the depressing inevitability of it all.

The title, by the way, is slang for dollar bills, referring to the US presidents’ faces on the paper money.

Also in the cast are Keith David, Chris Tucker, Freddy Rodriguez, Rose Jackson, N’Bushe Wright, Alvaleta Guess, James Pickens Jr, Jenifer Lewis, Clifton Powell, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Larry McCoy.

The story is by Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes and Michael Henry Brown and the screenplay by Brown.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3814

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