Juice (1992).
The Stage.
Four Harlem high school students learn the hard way that earning “juice” - also known as power and respect - comes with a price.
The Review.
Juice starts out innocently enough. We follow four teens - Q, an aspiring DJ played by Omar Epps, Raheem, a young, irresponsible single father played by Khalil Kain, Steel, played by Jermaine Hopkins, and the wildcard powder keg Bishop, played by Tupac - as they ditch school and do things that typical teens might have done in 1992. They hit up the arcade, run from truancy officers, hit the record store to jack a few vinyls, and try to buy cigarettes. They’re the Reckin’ Crew, just a group of four best friends…until a local thug named Blizzard is killed when he attempts to rob a local bar.
For some reason, this flips a switch in Bishop, who for some reason admires Blizzard’s gusto for going out in a blaze of glory. You know from the jump that Bishop is going to be the one who brings trouble down on the crew; in the first scene, you see him scrap with a neighborhood Puerto Rican gang in which racial epithets are tossed around by both parties, but this film steers away from copying the arc built into Boyz in the Hood, which came out the year prior. All of the kids are pretty good in their roles, but Tupac really shines in his acting debut as a continuously unhinged maniac threatening to bring everyone down with him. Things really take a turn for the worse about halfway through the film as the four young men commit an act that no one comes back from.
The themes in the story are going to be familiar if you like this particular crime subgenre - people who think they have no way out of the hood turn to violence in order to help themselves, hurting others who may seem to have more promise in the eyes of themselves and others. This morality play is similar to the aforementioned Boyz N The Hood, Straight Outta Brooklyn and Menace II Society. The promising one here is Q, who gets a chance to show his skills at the local DJ spinning contest. If I had to point out one weak link in the cast, it’s actually Omar Epps. I think he’s a pretty decent actor normally, and I don’t know if it was the script or the direction, but it never feels like Q feels the weight of the tragedies happening around him. His expression rarely changes, and the only real spark of emotion we see is more due to creative camera work than Epps. As a character, Q makes a lot of dumb decisions, and the climactic showdown at the end of the film feels forced in a really stupid way. Q schedules a meet with the film’s villain and I’m still not sure what his plan was supposed to accomplish. It ends up with a madcap dash to a rooftop that ends with a particularly corny line about “juice”. While I didn’t find the ending to be effective (in fact, it’s outright bad), it doesn’t spoil the journey, which is quite interesting.
Like many “hood” films of the era, Juice has an excellent soundtrack, featuring legends like Eric B. and Rakim, Too Short, Big Daddy Kane, EPMD, Cypress Hill, and more. The direction by Ernest Dickerson, a long time collaborator with Spike Lee, is solid in his directorial debut.
The End.
Juice is a solid entry into the pantheon of African-American coming-of-age crime stories, but it’s easy to see why it’s sometimes forgotten when put up next to the aggregate kings of the genre. Tupac Shakur puts forth a performance that overshadows those around him in his film debut and after watching this, I can’t help but think about the career that could have been if he wasn’t murdered at such a young age.
