Film

Gridlock'd (1996)

Director: Vondie Curtis-Hall

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

When fellow musician Cookie (Newton) overdoses on New Year's Eve, Stretch and Spoon resolve to get into rehab asap. They reckon, however, without the federal welfare system, a bureaucratic spaghetti junction which isn't about to help anyone in a hurry, least of all a couple of itchy smack addicts with attitude. Trekking from office to office, queue to queue, the pair take another hit to help them through the day, only to get mixed up with a brutal gangster and a murder investigation. A hip take on heroin addicts kicking against the pricks (Trainspotting in New York, you might say), the film has a fairly uninteresting narrative motor in its thriller subplot, but hits on an edgy black comic tone for Stretch and Spoon's increasingly pained dealings with the unsympathetic representatives of authority. Roth (Stretch) and the late Tupac Shakur (Spoon) work up a delicious, deadpan rapport, in which Stretch is the wild card and Spoon the long-suffering straightman, and which climaxes with a hilariously sick scene in which the former repeatedly stabs his compliant pal in the chest, in a last desperate bid for medical attention.

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