Redemption

Year: 2004 Rating: TV Overall Evaluation: 8.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 8.0 / 10 9.0 / 10 7.0 / 10 7.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

I, for one, am getting extremely tired of MTV-style editing. Maybe "kids these days" can't focus for more than 1/2 second at a time and that is who this movie is trying to reach so perhaps it can be excused. Overall good. It was made for TV so pretty much only the very most sensitive viewer will find anything offensive in the violence / nudity / profanity areas. Even without these elements the movie manages to get the point across.

Story

This is based on a true story about the co-founder of the Crips gang, "Tookie" Williams. He is currently on death row for murders he committed during a robbery. Once in prison he became "spiritual" (the film does not give details other than a random collection of quotes), and decides to speak out against gang-life. He enlists the help of a woman who was planning on writing his story and eventually publishes a series of children's books about gang banging. He also tries to unite the gangs and for this Sweden (the movie goofs and says Switzerland) nominates him for a Nobel prize.

Suppositions

No suspension of belief required for this gritty real-life film. Prison and street life are sanitized for TV.

Significance

The obvious message here is very good of course: don't join gangs.
OK, great. Even better - don't blame the white man if you do. Super! Further, there is not as much sentimental pandering to the bleeding hearts than I expected. All of this helped overcome one of my pet peeves that surfaced a few times in the film. This particular peeve involves the whole "let's fight bad-racism with good-racism" thing. Tookie's message is that gangs are bad because it makes "blacks kill other blacks." Does it matter that they are black or that they are simply humans??? Accentuating this is the fact that the other lead character (a black woman) is accused by Tookie of "selling out" because she dresses well and straightens her hair. By the end of the movie her hair is curly and she busts out more traditional "African dress" (I guess). Again with the subtle racism.

One other element I disliked was the lack of attention paid to the fact that Tookie was not on death row for being a gang banger - he is there because he murdered "civilians" in an attempted robbery. This was not the result of "blacks killing blacks" in a gangland shooting. But now Tookie is portrayed as this deep-thinking philosopher who easily slices through the woman's ignorant arguments against his actions. The one person in the movie to voice concern over this neglected fact is a "typical white Christian-fundamentalist male" who is then chastised by Tookie's new PR woman because (gee, can you guess?) "God is not a God of judgment, He is a God of love!" Wow, how profound.

These irritating elements aside, the film is obviously going for the non-gang thing which is good. Not bad for a TV movie.