Dead Presidents hammers home its point in its final scene, a quite brilliant and excruciating in its execution scene in the sense we may want these characters to get away with what they're doing. The scene is a heist, created between a handful of people who have come to know each other through the years and we have come to understand their predicaments. The finale sums up the sad, sad desperation some of the characters have had to resort to given their life and what has happened to them and captures how hard the times get when they get hard in the first place.
Dead Presidents is a crime drama; a social commentary and a war film all wrapped up in one. But this genre hybridity does not work against the film as much as it does compliment the epic feeling that we get when we recognise these characters have covered quite a fair distance. The film is Boyz in the Hood; Taxi Driver; Platoon and finishes it all off with a shoot out alá shortly after the robbery in Michael Mann's 1995 film 'Heat'. The finale stands out due to its jarring slow motion and attention to detail in how they have to go about their plan in brutal, violent, realistic detail each person is positioned and attacks a victim with a certain weapon in a certain way and focuses on a certain part of the victim. The shootout stands out due to its inclusion in what has been, so far, a film that avoids massive shoot outs and lashings of violence in a steady and careful study of an African-America man in a crisis.
The study behind Dead Presidents is intriguing and it's a study of maturity and coming to terms with responsibility. The film has its characters eventually resort to particularly desperate measures in order to merely live but does a good job in not glamorising these means. The primary focus here is the character of Anthony Curtis (Tate), a young African-American in the late sixties hanging around with his other young friends Jose (Rodríguez) and Skip (Tucker) all of whom are about to finish their education and hopefully enter some sort of employment. The setting up of the film is unspectacular but deliberately so; the kids hang out, get high and attend parties. But it is two things that click lead Anthony into his coming of age tale; they are the impregnation of Juanita (Jackson) and the volunteering to go to Vietnam to fight the cause for America in the war.
These two events will shape the character upon his arrival back to The States and it's through the pathetic, immature activities that occur at the very beginning that we will get a feel for how far Anthony has come along as a human being when the going really gets tough later on before, as I said, desperation kicks in. These tough times revolve around balancing a family that he has created as well as dealing with his Vietnam experiences in which he witnessed all the atrocities you'd associate with the war.
The film's opening third is teasing just as it is entertaining. It threatens to head down a route of crime complete with African-American gangsters hanging out in pool halls, taking rides with one another and getting into scraps; be it with one another over a hustle or Kirby (David), perhaps the fiercest criminal of this opening third, battering someone of a third party nature with his prosthetic leg because they owe him money. But the film never becomes stonewall in its genre and doesn't resort to clichés. It presents Anthony with a series of choices at a delicate time in his life but they are little choices such as 'Does he take the potentially ominous ride with Kirby into the unknown?' as Kirby goes to settle a score and how does he react to first seeing a gun and the potential danger that could spawn.
These are choices and scenarios that will prepare Anthony for larger, more important decisions. The scenes and scenarios are nothing we haven't seen before in the respective genre but they're still required for Anthony's maturing process. Once in the military, the film again threatens to break into genre and Anthony is faced once again with choices to do with whether he excepts the Euthanasia plea from a dying soldier guns and death and general darkness remain in his life and are the subject of a lot of his life experiences. But it's when Anthony returns to New York that a study kicks in. As a character, he has matured through experience and cannot seem to get on with his girlfriend Juanita who's now a mother after his tours of duty. The film feeds off Vietnam as a war which disables its lone individual from re-fitting into society in the snug, immature manner in which he could prior to the event.
Dead Presidents contains a fair number of good scenes and its reference to Taxi Driver as a study of America more observant and concerned with what's going on in a small, Asian country many miles away when home and its own people are in an equally nasty mess (New York, yet again) is interesting. Anthony's struggles with employment and family life as well as the pimp that helps out with money and just wants to be friends acts as a highlight that he cannot even get re-acquainted all too easily, no matter how criminally minded the person is and no matter how much they might have had in common had they met prior one of them going off and fighting for one's country.
