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Director John Singleton (
Boyz N the Hood,
Rosewood) made an earnest effort in this, his second, film to say a great deal that is true and relevant about living and loving in a violent, difficult time in American history. Janet Jackson plays a beautician and poet who withdraws into herself after her boyfriend is murdered by gangsters. The late Tupac Shakur plays a postman who tries to get through to her, and the two travel on a course through urban America, connecting with family and community. Singleton has so much on his mind that the film comes out a terrible muddle, but there is a certain integrity peeking through the fog. Shakur makes a startlingly good impression in his film debut, and Jackson strips away her star veneer to play something like a real person--and entirely succeeds. Maya Angelou wrote the poems that pass as those penned by Jackson's character, and she also appears in the film.
--Tom Keogh
Four young blacks, including Justice (Janet Jackson) and Lucky (Tupac Shakur), drive from Los Angeles to Oakland over the weekend. This being the movies, it turns out to be a journey of revelation-more for the characters, it has to be said, than for the audience. We sit and doze, while they bicker and smooch. The movie was written and directed by John Singleton, and it marks a depressing departure from his first feature, "Boyz N the Hood,'' which buzzed with rage and frustration. After a punchy start, the new film takes people away from their troubles, but it's a vacation without fun; we watch Justice gazing out to sea, or intoning lines of her own verse, or plunged in what one is reluctant to call thought. The poetry, written by Maya Angelou, clumps along with a confessional earnestness that makes you clench your fists and try not to laugh. The only live wire is Shakur, with his deep wariness of life, who has a couple of sprightly scenes that prod the picture awake. For all its profanity, however, "Poetic Justice" feels oddly conservative in the kinds of feeling that it shares out among its characters (especially the women), and in the cute domestic destinies that it imagines for them. Like Jackson herself (who never gets to sing), the whole enterprise is so poker-faced, and takes itself so seriously, that you're left wondering how Singleton could have shed so much creative energy between one film and the next. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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