This movie is amazing. One of the best I've ever watched! Jada! Queen! Vivica! Kimberly! They are bad-ass women. Without them, this movie wouldn't have been as great. I wonder why this movie isn't placed up there as one of the greats? Actually, I know why but I'm not going to talk about that. Otherwise, F Gary Gray did a magnificent job in telling this story. I was moved by the characters' motivations and results of their actions. I enjoyed watching the sisterhood between these girls and how they so cared about each other. They had a real hard or die quality to them. Movies in this genre that are as intense, in terms of the thrill, usually feature men, exclusively. So, this was a pleasant surprise because it featured not only women but African American women. 10/10

Bank teller Frankie Sutton (Vivica A. Fox) gets fired after the bank gets robbed by somebody she knows. Police detective Strode (John C. McGinley) suspects her involvement. She is forced to join her friends Stony Newsom (Jada Pinkett Smith), Cleo Sims (Queen Latifah), and TT Williams (Kimberly Elise) doing janitorial work. Stony's unarmed beloved brother Stevie gets killed by the cops. TT's boy has an accident and Child Services takes him away. Casual musings about robbing banks turn into reality. As they get more successful, the best friends start to clash.This is more than a crime drama and it's the more part that I'm uncertain of. It's painfully direct that three of the four girls are given reasons to do the robberies. They are victims first before they decide to do the crimes. It's a form of female empowerment movie. I don't really buy Stony's path. She should have sued the city and the police. It's too convenient to have so many problems. There is a similarity to 'Thelma & Louise' but it doesn't have quite the same equivalence. On the other hand, I like the attempt to change up the traditional bank heist movie.

Very touching and exciting movie! You really get to feel for the characters and the image of movie sticks with you for a while. There is a combination of strong, emancipated but hopeless women, drama, tension, romance and Queen Latifah as a lesbian ;) You follow the life of four women who have financial problems, most of them due to injustice caused by police and government. They also have lost or are bout to lose their loved ones. This pushes them over the edge and they decide to rob a bank. When watching the movie you really feel their inner struggle and how they feel they have no other choice. I loved every part of it. Definitely worth watching.

After a lively if predictable opening bank-heist scene, 'Set It Off' plummets straight into the gutter and continues to sink. This is a movie that deals in nasty, threadbare stereotypes instead of characters, preposterous manipulation instead of coherent plotting, and a hideous cocktail of cloying sentimentality and gratuitous violence instead of thought, wit or feeling. In short, it's no different from 90% of Hollywood product. But it's the racial angle that makes 'Set It Off' a particularly saddening example of contemporary film-making. Posing as a celebration of 'sistahood', the film is actually a celebration of the most virulent forms of denigrating Afican-American 'gangsta' stereotype. The gimmick this time is that the gangstas are wearing drag. Not only does the film suggest that gangsterism is a default identity for all African Americans strapped for cash or feeling a bit hassled by the Man, it presents its sistas as shallow materialists who prize money and bling above all else. Worse, 'Set It Off' exploits the theme of racial discrimination and disadvantage simply as a device to prop up its feeble plot structure. Serious race-related social issues are wheeled on in contrived and opportunistic fashion in order to justify armed robbery, then they're ditched as soon as the film has to produce the inevitably conventional ending in which crime is punished, the LAPD turns out to be a bunch of caring, guilt-ridden liberals (tell that to Rodney King), and aspirational 'good' sista, Jada Pinkett Smith, follows the path of upward mobility out of the 'hood and into a world of middle-class self-indulgence opened up for her by her buppie bank-manager boyfriend. 'Set It Off' illustrates the abysmal state of the contemporary blaxploitation film, pandering to mindless gangsta stereotypes and pretending to celebrate life in the 'hood while all the time despising it. While the likes of 'Shaft' and 'Superfly' in the 1970s might have peddled stereotypes and rehashed well-worn plots, they had a freshness, an energy and an innocence that struck a chord with audiences of all races and still makes them fun to watch. 'Set It Off' wouldn't be worth getting angry over if wasn't a symptom of the tragic decline and ghettoisation of African-American film-making since the promising breakthrough days of the early 1990s.