Vanessa Estelle Williams (professionally credited as Vanessa A. I also found Snipes' red suit, turtleneck and gold chain combo a bit gaudy, but I supposed that was considered cool at the time.) The cops instead get "New Jack Hustler" by Ice-T, easily the best song on the soundtrack. If he'd just had a regular flattop, he would have looked great. (Van Peebles also stacks the deck against him by associating him with New Jack Swing, a genre nobody has listened to since the early '90s, and giving him a ridiculous shark fun hairdo. Van Peebles wants us to know this is a bad guy who does bad things. And despite Wesley Snipes' immense charisma, we're never meant to find him appealing, as the closest we get to him are when he admits to gunning down an innocent woman, and later uses a child for a human shield during an attempt on his life. And I use "villain", instead of "protagonist", because the movie avoids making him our point of identification, placing us instead with a small team of unconventional cops determined to take him down.
New Jack City presents us with scene after scene of characters and communities ravaged by the crack epidemic, and situates much of its action in the projects and in the streets to make sure we know the true consequences of the villain's actions. The movie is about cocaine, the use of which brings about the protagonist's downward spiral, but we never see its effects on ordinary users. Scarface starts off in the grim realities of the streets, and as the protagonist climbs the criminal ladder, the movie gets more and more insular, with the climax taking place in his mansion as the manufactured reality of his empire collapses around him.
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