Dead Presidents

The twins' follow-up to Menace II Society is essentially a classic gangster movie (The Roaring Twenties, say) revamped and remoulded for a new context: black experience in the late '60s and early '70s. The war this time is Vietnam, but Anthony Curtis (Tate) comes back to face the age-old problems: unemployment and a woman he hasn't seen for too long. There are intriguing aspects to this yarn, and the brothers can choreograph a scene, but you get the impression that they learned all they know from other movies, the blood and guts is gratuitous, and the episodic narrative takes an awful long time to get nowhere very rewarding. Great heist sequence though.