A young black man Anthony Curtis is about to graduate from college in 1969 and volunteers from the United States Marine Corps . Coming home after a tour in the early 1970s . Needing a focus in life Anthony finds himself being drawn in to a life of crime DEAD PRESIDENTS was released in 1995 with a fair amount of hype . Directed by the Hughes brothers it was marketed as a film that marketed the black experience of coming home after Vietnam . One can understand why the film was marketed this way since the Hughes did make the critically acclaimed MENACE II SOCIETY , part of a short lived but acclaimed " Ghetto subgenre " in the early 1990s . DEAD PRESIDENTS might try to fit in to this type of genre but what ever type of movie it's trying to be it fails because there's an obvious flaw - there's not one single likable character in the movie If the Hughes brothers had been white I'm sure they'd have been accused of playing up to ethnic stereotypes or at the very least making a blacksplotation movie twenty years too late . The film starts with some foul mouthed characters lamenting the lack of sex in their lives and goes downhill from there . The film then cuts to Vietnam and if Anthnoy ( And the audience ) thought the ghetto was bad then Vietnam is a lot worse . The war scenes are genuinely disturbing and violent but again this seems very old hat when we'd already had a glut of anti-war films featuring the 'Nam ten years earlier and most of them making an anti-war point much better too . When Anthony returns to America he gets involved in a robbery that makes the Vietnam war look like an episode of TELETUBBIES This is a muddled , unfocused violent film that becomes more and more depressing as it goes along . If the Hughes are making a comment that returning soldiers from conflicts regardless of their colour are callously ignored by the country they fought to defend then they have failed . There's little incitement for the characters to become the violent ruthless criminals they are . Just because an educated college boy fought in a war zone it never seems a convincing character motivation to become a criminal , and the robbery itself on an armoured car is done so graphically and violently is enough to evaporate any potential sympathy one might have had at Anthony's plight Despite being a competently made film , the editing is very good for example , DEAD PRESIDENTS is a classic example of a film having to elicit empathy from the audience and if it fails to do this then the entire film fails

"We are being asked to take even larger doses of a medicine that has proved to be deadly and to undertake commitments that do not solve the problem, but only temporarily postpone the foretold death of our economy." - Hieronymos II (head of Greece's Orthodox Church) "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." - Martin Luther King, Jr "Austerity is difficult, absolutely, but it's necessary, for rich and poor alike, black and white." - Frank Campbell"The more things change, the more they stay the same." - Jean Baptiste Karr Albert and Allen Hughes direct "Dead Presidents" and "Menace 2 Society". Both films purport to be "serious" examinations of the trials and tribulations of post-Vietnam African Americans, but in reality function more as giant exploitation films. The influence here is Scorsese's "Goodfellas", which the young Hughes brothers – the perfect age to be seduced by Scorsese's pyrotechnics - attempt to mimic blow for blow. And like Scorsese's film, though absent of his considerable style, the Hughes' work here is thin, melodramatic and sensationalistic, with deaths, screams, headshots, bombast, snorting, swearing and fury schematically rolled out to shock, bludgeon and titillate rather than edify. An entire resurgence in African American film-making would be corrupted in the early 1990s with such films."This is how it really was," the brothers would claim in interviews, positing their early films as a response to John Singleton's (underrated) "Boyz n the Hood". Their films, the brothers claimed, portrayed the reality behind Singleton's supposedly "rosy" portrayal of the African American experience. But time has been unkind to their pictures. And as the baseline for what constitutes "realism" constantly moves, today "Dead Presidents" and "Menace to Society", once touted as being a form of "black neorealism" or "black naturalism", seem hilariously overcooked and gratuitous. And as with all these films, there is little understanding of why our cast of African Americans do what they do, behave how they behave or examination of the power structures and psycho-socio-economic forces at work. (Both films essentially boil down to blacks killing for money; but "economics" is itself the cause of "the problem", stretching all the way from Vietnam to the Slave Trade to the Roman Empire) Still, there are good moments scattered about. "Menace to Society" opens with its best scene, an impromptu robbery/massacre in which a couple of black kids shockingly gun down the Asian shop-workers who insulted them. If disrespect is the root of all violence, we see that here, the larger marginalization of, or systemic disrespect toward, African Americans breeding both feelings of unworthiness and its opposite, a kind of manic need to protect, sometimes violently, brutalized egos. Black culture may have been mocked in the 90s for its "bling", its hysterical materialism, but this, as well as the numerous riots which rocketed across the US in the early 90s, was an understandable "response" to both widespread feelings of neglect and a culture with conflates wealth and worth. One should not have to prove one's humanity, one's worthiness, and when one is constantly forced to do so, pressure builds and one sometimes snaps. What's pertinent about "Menace's" "snaps" is that the victim's of such black aggression are always minorities or other blacks. Meanwhile, white faces are absent from the picture. Society functions in a similar way, Power deflecting hate away from itself – "down" the "social hierarchy" - and onto others. Unfortunately the rest of the picture degenerates into gratuitous gore and violence.Better than "Menace" is "Dead Presidents", which opens in 1968 and attempts to charter the lives of three friends (played by Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker, and Freddy Rodriguez) from the Bronx. They fight in Vietnam, are abandoned by the state, struggle to make a living, battle addiction and are then drawn to a life of crime.Like "Menance", "Presidents" at time shows traces of political savvy – one of the guards killed during the robbery is himself a Vietnam vet - but sensationalism, cynically employed shocks and thriller set pieces eventually undermine claims to earnestness. Blame Scorsese for this. Singleton's "Boyz n the Hood" was released before "Goodfellas" and so is stylistically somewhat different from most "African American" films of the period.5/10 – Worth one viewing.

This movie is just a total waste of time. I'm telling you DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME.Terrible Acting, I mean Chris Tucker??? This guy is just horrible.The slowness of this film isn't the only issue I have with it, the directing is awful.Take for example the scenes in Vietnam - how predictable were they??? The camera angles were done by a first time director.The scene at the butcher shop - look how immature this scene really is. Are the people walking by robots? Its as if they tried to over direct them.Scene when girl first meets him her father (Anthony) - is she a Zombie? Its like a 1970s film where they used a puppet to get the child actor's attention.And when he is having nightmares - What the HELL!! OK and last 2 rips:Absolutely needed more music in the background, the silence made some scenes so slow, so boring.And why all the racial references? Just not needed!Skip the waste of 2hrs.

*** out of ****The directors of MENACE 2 SOCIETY teamed up again for this 1995 hit, DEAD PRESIDENTS. It is the story of a young man who gets involved in too many complicated things and it all goes way over his head. It is a brutal, effective, and very intense film that I can recommend if you think you can handle it.The story is basically this. During the 1960s a young adult named Anthony can't take anymore school, so he drops out and works petty crimes at the billiard hall with the owner who has no legs. When he finally gets tired of that lifestyle, he decides to enlist in the army. Since the Vietnam war going on, he goes in and becomes mentally unstable due to the atrocities. When he gets back home, his girlfriend has had his child and he tries to support her and his daughter. Unfortunately, the food place with the part time job that he had been contending to has gone bankrupt, leaving him with no job, no money, no food, and no choices. His desperate search descends into a downward spiral of war flashbacks and his overall loss on morality.This has been billed as an action movie for some odd reason. I mean, sure, there are action scenes in it, but not the kind that action movie fans would enjoy. The action scenes in this are quite realistic and unpleasant. The violence is pretty ugly. The scenes that take place between Anthony and his girlfriend, Juanita, are extremely creepy and quite believable. When he yells at her when she nags him, the viewer feels like they really hate each other.The most interesting aspect about this film is the character played by, believe it or not, Chris Tucker as the childhood friend whose life ends up being worse off then Anthony's. He becomes addicted to heroin, has flashbacks almost all the time, and is about ready to self destruct. Chris Tucker takes a surprisingly serious and very believable turn as this tortured character. It's quite neat to see a man who is known for normally being a funny and annoying actor take such an extreme role. He does a fine job.The film's war sequences are super gruesome, but it makes sense for them to be considering the main character and his dilemma. The violence he sees in the war is not at all what he is used to and the viewer feels this too. When it occurs, it is usually surprisingly realistic and over the top. Since it feels appropriate for the story, it's unlikely that the film would surprise you with such gritty realism outside of the war, but you'd be wrong. Somehow, the filmmakers are able to have the scenes that take place out of the war to be just as harrowing as the war scenes. I don't know how they did it.The underlying message of the film is that the Vietnam war veterans deserved way better than what they got when they returned home. The government did them no favors and granted them no opportunities. It's sad, especially since people like Anthony are poor and need government support to just be able to live. It doesn't matter if they dropped out of school or if they didn't join the army for the right reasons. They are still human beings, and no human being should live their lives regretting something they were involved in that left such a dark mark on the history of America.Rated R for strong graphic violence, language, a sex scene and some drug use.