New Jack City is an all-to-forgotten mess, and race is probably the reason it doesn't get mentioned in the same conversations with movies like Roadhouse and On Deadly Ground. The principal players and the director are African American so the lily-white fraternity of film critics might have been a bit apprehensive about pointing out that New Jack City is one of the most over-wrought, ham-fisted, hyper-acted, poorly-written, unrealistic and embarrassingly sincere major releases of the decade. But we've freed our mind since then--New Jack City is a piece of crap, and all races, creeds and colors are to blame.

The movie's problems begin at the helm with director Mario Van Peebles. Peebles is a jack-off of all trades, and his corny acting is only outdone by his terrible directing. In his defense, he doesn't have much to work with here. First of all, the acting is terrible. Along with the aforementioned, Peebles, the movie stars Wesley Snipes, Ice Cube, Judd Nelson, Alan Payne, and Chris Rock as a junkie named "Pookie." Snipes is serviceable, but everyone else falls somewhere between terrible and abysmal. Alan Payne is a big ham as the right hand man. Ice T delivers a performance in his now signature style: speaking every word of every line in a threatening bad-ass manner regardless if the line calls for it or not. Judd Nelson is hopelessly miscast as a tough cop who sports fringed leather motorcycle gloves and shoots smiley faces through wooden doors for absolutely no reason. And Chris Rock is laughably manic as a junkie/turned clean informant/turned junkie. At the time, he actually got good reviews for the performance, but in reality, it is the worst performance in a movie full of bad acting.

Of course, how much you can really blame the actors is hard to say, because the writing is really, really bad. You can't shine shit. Some screenplays are bad because the dialogue is unrealistic, while some screenplays are bad because you can tell the writer is only interested in writing punchy scenes even if they don't flow together organically. That's not the case here. Here, the writer, Thomas Lee Wright, wasn't even interested in writing unified scenes. He was just interested in catchy lines. The result is crazy, short, and sloppy vignettes filled with lines like, "Am I my brother's keeper? Yes I am!" and "I wanna shoot you so bad, my dick's hard!"

Along with line-driven writing, and unnatural dialogue the only other problem with the script is that the story is completely retarded. The most laughably unrealistic element the audience is expected to choke back is the idea that Neno Brown is a rising drug dealer able to establish a Fortune 500-sized empire with headquarters that take up an entire New York City hotel. The headquarters not only serve as his office, but are also the center of production and distribution. Instead of selling surreptitiously on corners, Neno just has the junkies come to his hotel to buy and use there. He is able to keep the cops out by giving the junkies electromagnetic zip cards. No zip card, no entry. OK, I don't know anyone who can keep track of their local supermarket's savings card, but a crack addict is supposed keep tabs on a zip card? Oh, geez, here it is--right next to my crack pipe.

Also, even the movie was made in 1991, it smacks of Eightiesness. You have the "initially tumultuous odd coupling of a tough black cop and a tough white cop" (Ice T/ Judd Nelson,) the indignant thug telling it like it is on the stand speech" ("Drugs ain't a black thing, or a white thing. It's a death thing. Death don't give a shit about color!"), and more climaxes than an Asian porn film. The most unbelievable and unnecessary one being when the audience finds out that Neno Brown just happened to have randomly killed Ice-T's mother years earlier--cringetastic.

The movie ends with an overly neat murder of Neno Brown by an old codger with a Lugar, and then the credits role. But not before the viewer is treated to a printed epilogue about how this story isn't real, but that it is true to life because there are hundreds of Neno Browns around the nation. So, wait, hundreds of hotels have been purchased by cocaine magnates and converted into towering, cost-inefficient crack houses? Oh, forget it.