Movie Review – “Juice” (1992)

Release Date: January 17, 1992

Production Companies: Paramount Pictures/Island World/Moritz-Heyman (later known as Original Film)

Hello, everyone. I am starting a different series at the moment. I am not done with the other one involving “The Hip-Hop Martial Arts Trilogy” that I did before where the next step was to cover the soundtrack albums. I will get to those. I am just on a bit of a break from that at the moment. So right now, my main interest is covering all of the movies Tupac Shakur was in, at least as a character because I am not sure about covering 1991’s “Nothing But Trouble,” which had him appear as a part of Digital Underground in one scene. Not sure if it really should count, unless I do a bonus post of a particular scene.

With that being said, I felt that this was the best place to start. So I may cover his films in order of release, which may mean I will cover “Poetic Justice,” “Above the Rim,” “Bullet,” “Gridlock’d,” and “Gang Related.” Yes, he was only six films, at least as a character, so here I go.

I was a little kid when this film came out but I first acknowledged its existence when it came out on video. I was about 6 years old when it came to video and I remembered seeing the display poster at Blockbuster Video back in those days but I was never sure what the movie was about. It wasn’t until about 2001 (at the age of 15) when I caught it on BET that I first watched it, or at least a good portion of it. Despite the censors of the language, the violence was still intact, and this movie got pretty violent (though not as much as “Menace II Society,” which is something I may need to touch on). When I was younger, being a hip-hop head as well, I had a fascination with “hood movies,” at least that what they were perceived as. It was more common during the 1990s that these types of films came out, such as “Boyz N the Hood,” the aforementioned “Menace II Society,” “New Jack City,” “New Jersey Drive,” “Clockers,” “Fresh,” etc. It was a common thing during that time when it came to black cinema. Even in the late-1980s at the turn of the decade, there were other examples like 1989’s “Do the Right Thing.”

I had seen this one a few times before, actually. In more recent times, things started to become clearer to me in terms of story.

Before I get into the film, I had heard on a video from a YouTube channel called Axiom Amnesia that a script had been written much earlier and the director Ernest Dickerson (who had later on directed “Bones,” another film I covered a while back) had wanted to do it in the early-1980s but with being greenlighted in the 1990s, it’s hard to imagine this with a more early-1980s (with some shades of the late-1970s) added into a story like this. I had also watched an interview with the main cast about the auditions and how it was hard to get certain parts and they were hired for the roles they ended up playing.

What’s interesting about this movie is that there is a genre shift about more than 1/3 of the way through, but there was a gradual buildup to the shift. Because when you really think about it, the whole plot was a coming-of-story about four teenagers whose innocence was lost after experiencing some unfortunate events brought on by one of the main characters. The movie went from sequences of the quartet skipping school and messing around to the remaining characters fearing for their lives after said unfortunate incident, especially since (SPOILER ALERT) one of them gets killed. Of course, there are also subplots, such as Q (Omar Epps) having aspirations to become a DJ. At the end of the day, they all want respect, power, in other words, juice, hence its title, but there is also a hidden message related to friendship in the plot.

When you really look deep into the characters, there is often some depth to them than what is displayed on the surface. For example, Bishop (Tupac Shakur) may have been the antagonist for the better part of the film, but there was also some pain and suffering deep down. The rest of them, like Q, Raheem (Khalil Kain), and Steel (Jermaine Hopkins) all getting involved in the mix that led up to that fateful point, and the chemistry between the leads was good enough that you felt like they were friends that had known each other for years.

Acting aside, I also have to admire the direction that Dickerson took with the camera work. Many scenes complemented the emotions of the characters, as well as the tones of said scene. For example, one scene had the camera moving around to give off Q’s feeling after witnessing a horrific event. Then you had this scene, and I could even talk about the performance from both Omar and Pac, because this is one scene that stood out when I saw it on TV back in the day.

Pac gave off a chilling performance that he felt terrifying in this scene. Then you have this scene, which was in the finale, that gave off a mix of action and horror, and for some reason it works.

It’s hard to imagine how dark things took when earlier on, you had scenes like this earlier in the film.

Something tells me I should read the script to see how it all went down and maybe watch it with the commentary. Like I said, the change in tones actually worked because when watching it again, many of the plot elements actually made sense. As I also said about the camera work, there was also a scene where you look in the eyes of Bishop, who was being hassled by the character of Radames (Vincent Laresca) and then what you see in the foreground goes out of focus to shift focus on Q and Steel.

As for other things, the soundtrack to this movie is still fire after all these years. It really adds to the environment of Harlem and the time period this movie came out in, even when you hear Bay Area (California) rappers such as Too Short and Pooh Man on the soundtrack. Even the R&B songs give off the vibe of the early-1990s. Speaking of music, I also saw a lot of cameos in this film. Queen Latifah played the emcee for the DJ competition. Treach (of Naughty By Nature) was one of Radames’s goons. Also, if you look closely at one scene in a bar, you will see Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith sitting there. This was when they were still EPMD. In fact, the soundtrack still holds up now that I must cover it eventually.

Another thing I found interesting was that this game actually had a scene where the first “Street Fighter” game was shown. This film was likely shot in either 1990 or 1991 (it came out at the start of 1992, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was originally slated for a 1991 release). This was also before the release of “Street Fighter II,” which helped popularize fighting games in that time.

This movie holds up after all these years. I may have seen it a few times but I still get chills seeing Pac as Bishop. Omar Epps went on to have a good career after this as he was in “Higher Learning” a few years later and then in the 2000s, he was on the doctor show, “House.” I would have to say a lot of this film with the message it conveys, as well as a lot of the technical aspects, and of course, the music.

4.25/5