Wesley Snipes got two of his most important roles in 1991. In Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" he played a man in a relationship with a white woman, causing strife in both communities. In Mario Van Peebles's "New Jack City", he played a drug lord. The movie sort of plays with the audience: on the one hand we know that crack devastated the black community (and the authorities used it as an excuse to imprison large numbers of black men, leaving two generations of black youth fatherless). But at the same time, the movie makes you root for Snipes's ruthless Nino as he rises to power. It's sort of like "The Godfather" in that sense.
A message at the end of the movie notes that the drug epidemic will continue unless we see action instead of empty slogans. Only in the past few years have we started to see states dial down the so-called War on Drugs, and some have even legalized recreational marijuana. It's only now, after we've seen entire neighborhoods ruined and countries destabilized, that we've started taking a common-sense approach.
Anyway, it's not a masterpiece, but still worth seeing. The rest of the cast includes Van Peebles, Ice-T, Judd Nelson, Chris Rock, Vanessa Williams and Bill Cobbs.
