The Takeaway: New Jack City
In the 1991 film New Jack City, directed by Mario Van Peebles, we follow a ruthless drug dealer and his rise to power during New York City’s crack epidemic. This drug dealer is Nino Brown who is played by Wesley Snipes.
Let me start here. As a fan of the crime genre and a regular consumer of popular culture, Nino Brown is a name that has always been on my radar. It seems like so many of the TV shows, movies, and podcasts that I have listened to over the years have always referenced this character, Nino Brown. So heading into the movie, there was a lot of hype surrounding this character and I was eager to see how he stacked up against some of the all-time bad dudes. Like are we talking Darth Vader bad? Thanos bad? Keyser Soze Bad? No, surely not Johnny Lawrence bad? That’s the worst kind of bad. I still can’t get over how big of pricks the Cobra Kai were.
https://medium.com/@ComebackCam/the-takeaway-the-karate-kid-17dccdeffeee
Side bar: I am currently watching Cobra Kai on Netflix and I’m starting to come around on Johnny, although he does not make it easy.
Back to New Jack City. Nino Brown may be the worst of them all. The man is cold, ruthless, and unapologetic. He regularly reminds us how nothing is personal, it’s all about business. It’s the same approach that brings him to power, that is sure to take him down.
This is not a particularly original theme in movies. We see this play out all the time, Wall Street, Casino, Goodfellas, and most memorably, Scarface, which Nino is watching in multiple scenes in the movie. We should have known this wasn’t going to end well.
Anyway, there is plenty of heavy stuff we can learn about from this movie. It’s obviously a depiction of the drug trade and its effects on inner city life. At one point early on, Nino drops this line which I think carries a lot of weight, “You have to rob to get rich in the Regan era.” Regardless of your politics, it’s an insightful quote. And obviously much is to be learned from the rise and downfall of the character. But as it usually goes with me, I’m here for the lighter stuff. Leave the story arc and emotional depth to the guys who get paid to do this. I’m here to be goofy.
Holy hats! There are so many hats in this movie. We get stocking caps, baseball hats, and literally every single variation of the fedora. But the greatest hat achievement of this film is the number of Kangols that they try to squeeze into this movie like I wasn’t going to notice. What was going on from a fashion standpoint? According to my records, there are nine different Kangols in this movie and at least four in the picture below.
There is a love making scene…
This is the part of the rambling where I am legally obligated to tell the children to leave the room.
There is a love making scene where Nino Brown and this woman with an absolutely abhorrent haircut seem to be “getting intimate” in a bed that appears to be in a dungeon of sorts, perhaps a love dungeon. Now the whole love dungeon thing seems strange enough, but in said dungeon, there appears to be about 247 lit candles and I have to ask, who the hell has the time to do this? Passion and romance are fantastic and if you’re into reading erotic novels, well cool, I guess but in reality, who has the time, the energy, or the patience to light all of those candles.
Granted, I’m probably a little scarred on candles from the great acolyte debacle of 2006. Never before or since has an acolyte had to make his way down the church aisle twice just to light two candles. It’s a logic problem that keeps me up at night 14 years later. We just went from talking about a sex scene to me being embarrassed about an incident that happened to me at church.
We have seen Nino do a lot of things throughout this movie and have a lot of success, but they really slipped up when they decided to put Nino on a basketball court playing his best friend and Cash Money Brother, Gee Money. What is so wrong you ask? Well allow me to elaborate. Let’s start by watching the scene so we can break it down more in depth. By the way… NSFW
First off, the pants. If you’re a hooper, you’ve got to have a pair of shorts with you at all times. Everyone knows that. Just ask my guy G-Money, not the character in the movie, no, my long-time friend G-Money. He is the first self-proclaimed “Hooper” I ever met, and he will tell you that a hooper always has on a pair of shorts. The man had on a pair of Jordan shorts beneath his dress slacks when he was standing up there on my wedding day. So if Nino and Gee Money had some beef that they needed to squash, no way in hell they’re taking it to the court like this. I just don’t buy it.
Not only the pants. After what appears to be a foul called on the Nino’s offensive rebound the two exchange some sort of “I know you are but what am I” back and forth regarding the check procedure.
“Check Money.” — Nino
“No. Double Check.” — Gee Money
And as bad as that exchange was, Snipes’ basketball credibility only gets worse as the scene continues when he appears to commit a series of offensive fouls (primarily consisting of a combination of forearm shivers), followed by an egregious travel (that went uncalled), and then one of the worst jump shot runner things in cinematic history.
Look I know I am in the weeds here and this is likely where I will lose you but try and stay with me. I know this is a movie and Wesley Snipes is an actor and not an athlete but come one, that was terrible. It was so bad, they should have considered removing the scene from the movie altogether. Nino loses so much credibility when he takes that awful shot because I have to believe that a gangster to the degree of Nino Brown either one, knows how to get a bucket, or two, is self-aware enough to know that this ain’t it for him and to avoid the court entirely.
And here is the real Takeaway from the movie. There is no way in hell that Ron Shelton saw this movie. This movie was released in 1991, the following year we get the release of another major Wesley Snipes film, written and directed by Ron Shelton. That movie is called White Men Can’t Jump and it is a great film largely taking place on the basketball court. In the film Snipes plays a character named Sidney Deane who is basically a walking bucket. He’s smooth with his handle and even smoother with the trash talk, but it’s also one of those movies where if you actually slow it down and watch the actual sports scenes, you realize that Snipes is never actually making a meaningful contribution on the court. It’s just a bunch of slow motion jump passes, but the man can’t actually score. It’s all flash and no substance. So there’s the Takeaway, Ron Shelton should have watched this movie.
6.3/10
