The Hughes brothers live in Pomona, quite a social distance from the grim Los Angeles neighborhoods their movie portrays as grinders of young lives. The almost randomness of the killings and beatings, and the almost affectlessness of the killers and beaters, combined with the numbing profanity of people whose most common locutions are the coarsest in the language, bludgeon the audience into a frame of mind akin to the fatalism that envelops most of the movie's characters. The movie's unrelievedly bleak message is that the intergenerational transmission of violence will continue. At the end of the movie a child watches Caine die. This "Menace" does, from the first frames, showing the casual murder of a Korean couple in their convenience store, to the final fusillade of the drive-by shooting that kills the movie's protagonist and narrator, Caine.Ĭaine is shown as the essentially unparented child of an addictive mother (soon dead of an overdose) and a murderous father who guns down a man during a living room card game. Allen Hughes, one of the 21-year-old twin brothers who directed the movie "Menace II Society," says, "Our intention was to have the audience turn away." These two African American prodigies have made a stunning, troubling movie that compels contemplation of this question: In a nation saturated with violence, can a portrayal of violence be valuable because it is therapeutic? The answer may be: Yes, if the portrayal is so relentlessly realistic that it nearly sickens viewers and strengthens their resolve to enforce domestic tranquillity.
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