DEAD PRESIDENTS (Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes, 1995) R

Reviewed: May 7, 2002

Part domestic drama, part coming of age story, part heist film, and part war movie, the Hughes Brothers' Dead Presidents tries to cram too much into two hours. I hate having to fault films for being overly ambitious--I'll take a balls to the wall failure over decent mediocrity any day of the week--but my point withstands. Mainly it is the heist part of Dead Presidents that suffers. The heist sequence itself could have been the centerpiece of a dynamite closing act, but instead feels forced and too brief and tacked on and not carefully developed. The brothers should have stretched their running length out another half hour and given themselves the extra room they needed and earned. The first ninety minutes of Dead Presidents are of a high enough caliber that an additional hour of the audience's attention would be richly deserved.

Pic follows actor Larenz Tate as Anthony Curtis through late 1960s the Bronx, into Vietnam and back out. The character's arc is a simple one we've seen before: high-school innocent to battlefield killer to troubled veteran and so while Dead Presidents doesn't break any new ground, it is its superb acting (Tate captures his evolution dead on; Chris Tucker does exciting work as a junkie; Keith David's voice is a beautiful thing) and great, exacting filmmaking (even if the brothers do seem to be riffing on Scorsese a little too much at times) that often made me willing to overlook this fact. The script oscillates between strong, well written, sometimes even surprising scenes of truth to dialogue that frequently feels a little stiff and too on the nose (particularly the closing scene, which comes across as a ridiculously desperate attempt to pound the movie's points). The Hughes Brothers have thrown so many ingredients into the pot (interestingly, race is not one of them) I anxiously awaited some kind of revelation, a big flash of originality or an explosion of brilliance that would tie their whole film together.

Alas, eureka never comes. If the Hughes Brothers think that making a statement about how war can turn good people into bad ones is ultimately gonna carry a film, I counter they're mistaken. The dehumanization of war is a theme we've seen countless times, most powerfully in The Deer Hunter, and at this point in cinema, a filmmaker simply needs to do more. For awhile Dead Presidents had me convinced it was going to.

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