Menace (2002)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by John Marino
Directed by John Marino
Starring Johnny Green, Alison Lohman, James Andronica, Merced Bacon, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Jonathan Avildsen

Released by: Artisan
Region: 1
Rating: R
Anamorphic: Nope. Presented in glorious letterbox

My Advice: Avoid it.

John Marino's Menace is a compelling argument against Hollywood nepotism (as if the Wayans brothers weren't doing enough to argue against that cause just by continuing to draw breath). Starring Marino's son Johnny Green, the film revolves around a young street hustler's attempts to find true love, avoid real work, and stay stoned out of his gourd most all the time. As an aside, you won't find the film listed on IMDB as "Menace," having it instead listed under preliminary title White Boy. I don't know if the title was changed for the video release (in hopes of tricking people looking for a real gangsta picture...the cover doesn't even depict the film's stars, with the two young African-American men getting something like ten minutes of screen-time, total).

So, with the evident marketing plan of "let's hope we fool some people into buying it," there wasn't a great deal of hope from the outset. The movie starts promisingly enough, with a confused-looking Jan-Michael Vincent playing a racist cop that shoots a black college kid on a routine traffic stop. There are some snippets of the trial on TV, and then we get Brian (Green), smoking reefer and peddling dime bags to assorted headcases and burnouts. He's running a bit of a scam on his supplier and his customers, in time-honored never-trust-a-junkie tradition. None of this appears to have a thing to do with the racially motivated shooting.

Then Brian meets a young girl (Lohman), seduces her, falls in love, finds out she's pregnant (by her ex), finds out the ex is a possessive white supremacist, and gets beat up. Still no word on J.M. Vincent and whether or not the pre-title sequence had anything whatever to do with the rest of the picture. Brian wants to get even with supremacist boy, who is now threatening the girl, but rather than deal with the issue himself, he goes to try and get a couple of his regular buyers (the only two black guys in the film, near as I can tell) to off this skinhead moron for him. They say sure, but there's a condition. Brian has to whack the racist cop (a-HA!...knew he'd come up sooner or later...of course, now there's less than fifteen minutes left in the movie).

Essentially, the flick can't decide which of two movies it wants to be. It's either a weird inner-city love story, or it's a racial-tensions-run-amok cautionary tale. But it's neither of them very effectively. The racial tension thing plays minimal part in the flick barring the skinhead ex-boyfriend and the shooting at the beginning, and since almost everyone in the picture is white, this is no surprise. The inner-city love story isn't terribly convincing for a couple of reasons. First, they appear to be living in the suburbs (nicer than any ghetto I've seen, in any case). Second, the two leads are so flat as to be completely unbelievable when attempting to appear romantically attached to each other. Green couldn't act his way out of a sack, and Lohman's only marginally better. In fairness, the problem could be the script, but since neither precisely have a HUGE film history for me to compare this to, so I'm gonna spread blame around a bit.

The DVD treatment does little to help matters, presented in letterbox rather than real anamorphic widescreen, and with no features to speak of on the disc. I'm not convinced any feature could save this one, short of perhaps including the entirety of Menace II Society as a sort of apology for attempting to deceive the buyer with the cover art, but the lackluster treatment here makes it clear that the DVD production was as half-assed as the film's casting.

Stay far away, boys and girls. We'd like to remember Jan-Michael Vincent as he was, the prototypical American anti-hero, instead of this mumbling mockery desperate for a paycheck. And we'd like to remain ignorant of the rest of the "talent" the picture presents for our entertainment.