Set It Off (1996)

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Bank teller Frankie Sutton (Vivica A. Fox) gets fired after the bank gets robbed by somebody she knows. Police detective Strode (John C. McGinley) suspects her involvement. She is forced to join her friends Stony Newsom (Jada Pinkett Smith), Cleo Sims (Queen Latifah), and TT Williams (Kimberly Elise) doing janitorial work. Stony's unarmed beloved brother Stevie gets killed by the cops. TT's boy has an accident and Child Services takes him away. Casual musings about robbing banks turn into reality. As they get more successful, the best friends start to clash.This is more than a crime drama and it's the more part that I'm uncertain of. It's painfully direct that three of the four girls are given reasons to do the robberies. They are victims first before they decide to do the crimes. It's a form of female empowerment movie. I don't really buy Stony's path. She should have sued the city and the police. It's too convenient to have so many problems. There is a similarity to 'Thelma & Louise' but it doesn't have quite the same equivalence. On the other hand, I like the attempt to change up the traditional bank heist movie.

F. Gary Gray the director of Friday takes a turn from comedy to drama in a film people call a rip off of The Town. I disagree because this came out 14 years earlier. This a very underrated film that sadly a lot of people have dismissed.The film is about a group of four women played by Vivica A. Fox, Queen Latifa, Jada Pinkett Smith and Kimberly Elise who rob a bank to get money for Kimberly Elise because her child has been taken away by child protective services. After getting the thrill from robbing a bank for the first time and decide to do again this time they get more money. They then want to rob one last bank this time running away to another country with the money.This is a underrated gem. The film is very well paced and has great suspense. The group of 4 leading ladies have great chemistry together and has a very nice storyline to go along with it. Definnetly check this one out.Rated R For Strong Graphic Violence, Pervasive Language, Some Sex And Drug Use.Theatrical Cut: 2hrs 1min/121min. Directors Cut: 2hrs 4min/124min.126 uses of the F-word.****/****

Set It Off is an explosive drama about four young black women, who are best friends. Living in the Los Angeles ghetto, each of them struggles with economic and emotional hardships. All of them suffer deeply, due to injustices perpetrated against them by their employers, trigger-happy cops, and the welfare bureaucracy. Fed-up with how life has knocked them around, and desperate to escape the ghetto, the four friends decide to resort to robbing banks together.This film is very fast-paced, with gripping suspense throughout the course of the movie. There's scarcely a dull moment. This movie is overflowing with tire-screeching car chases, blazing gunfire, and volatile interactions between the characters. The breath-taking action sequences really draw you in to the precarious world, of the criminal quartet. It's good that Hollywood finally decided to make a film, that has African-American female characters who make such a deep impact. They're just as rough, vulgar, and determined to change their lives for the better, as any of the male characters are. They're deadly serious about being willing to risk their lives, to take up criminal activities. The women in the film, don't depend on men to determine their course of action. They know that it's up to them alone, to work together to accomplish their bank heists.The four actresses who played the main characters, all give strong performances. Especially Queen Latifah as the hardened butch lesbian, Cleo Simms. She really makes the viewer believe that Cleo can fearlessly handle just about anything, that she's up against. Jada Pinkett also gives a compelling performance as Stoney. Pinkett shows an amazing emotional range, and is able to convey the contradictory moods of Stoney with ease. Vivica Fox as Frankie, is vivid in her role, but not quite as charismatic as either Queen Latifah, or Jada Pinkett. Kimberley Elise as the desperate single mother, Tisean, gives a heartrending performance.This film crackles with a heady intensity, that's rare in films with women as the main characters. These sistahs prove that they are forces to be reckoned with, as they fight for their dreams in a male dominated world. This cutting-edge action film, delivers jolt-after-jolt of exciting entertainment.

I've never lived in the projects. I have in no way experienced the plight of the marginalized. I've never known what it's like to be kept below the line that divides those who should be educated and those who should be left in the dark. For that reason I, by no means, have any right to speak for those people. But after watching the 1996 movie "Set it Off," I can't understand why no one seemed to get offended at its ignorance about, and exploitation of, the lower class- in particular the struggling black communities of urban areas."Set it Off" is about four close-knit women who have all had tough breaks in life. They made the best out of growing up in the projects and became, for the most part, honest, hard-working and self-respecting young women. The story starts off with Francesca, a bank clerk, getting held up and witnessing a violent shoot out that her fear crippled her from possibly preventing. A by the numbers detective named Strode blames her for it, causing her to get fired. The story shifts to its main character Lida, Francesca's friend who is a janitor in an upper-class apartment building, soon learning she has to compromise all of her good traits just to break even in life. To help her little brother get some money for college, she gives in to her shady employer's sexual demands. When her brother is coincidentally mistaken for the bank robber by Strode, he is shot and killed with no apologies.The movie was off to a good start, but I quickly started noticing that its scenes were getting progressively dumber. First off all, Strode seems to be on every case that the L.A.P.D. has to offer. Being that I have heard much praise for this film, I was surprised when more and more coincidences started trying my patience. The movie started feeling like a predictable crowd-pleaser, although it was supposed to be a hard-hitting protest about why the lower class seems to have abandoned.Any high school or college writing class teaches that to evaluate something is to see how closely or effectively it comes to its intended mark. My problem with "Set it Off" is that it is unclear as to what its mark really is. It shakily walks the line between action movie and socially-conscious drama so much that I started to question how dumb does the screenwriter thought his audience was. Since there is an objective made early on in the script, that there must be a reckoning for the unfair treatment of these women (and the lower-class community at large), it is questionable when it starts to stray.In his three and a half star (out of four) review of the film, Roger Ebert calls it "observant and well-informed." Sure the film had some very relatable characters and situations, but the screenplay is far from "Observant and well-informed." If anything, the writing is histrionic. A realistic screenplay would have characters who were less heroic and aware of their exploitation. Sure Queen Latifah is fabulous as a gun-toting lesbian, but does such a character really represent underprivileged women? A competent screenplay also wouldn't rely on coincidences and action sequences to make its point.(1 and 1/2 out of 4)