Deep Cover (1992)

One of Larry's best early lead performances of the nineties

Deep Cover is Fish's third best performances of the early nineties behind Boyz N The Hood and What's Love Got To Do With It. The character he plays in Deep Cover is a smooth cop who gets in over his head when he goes undercover. Jeff Goldblum makea great bad guy and the direction by Bill Duke was also very good following A Rage In Harlem from a year earlier. April 1, 2008

Deep Cover

Its a great movie about a cop who goes under cover and stays there while at the same time gets caught up in conflict among his peers, and then realizes that he has to make decisions about his future after his rise to power as a drug dealer is swift and easy. Great dialogue and choice of characters to reflect how wide spread the reach of drugs are in every type class. February 23, 2008

Classic Fishburne!

This is probably the movie that catapulted Laurence Fishburne's career. It is also one of the movies are consider as a follow up to New Jack City. If you are a fan of Fishburne, then this is definitely the movie to have in your collection. It's as deep cover as you can get far as cracking down on the drug game can get. July 3, 2007

Deep Cover

I consider the song selections very good. Basically, I purchased the CD for the title cut. In my opinion, it is Dr. Dre's and Snoop's best cut together ever. May 14, 2007

Solid and well-acted 90's "war on drugs" fantasy - implausible but entertaining

The opening scene of this film is probably the best, and sets up nicely the tone of the remainder of the film. It is Christmas time and snowing heavily as a father drives his son to the liquor store, snorts some coke, and then asks the boy what he wants for Christmas. He then robs a liquour store at gunpoint, and is shot in the back in front of his son Russell and next to a fake Santa. The scene captures a nightmare from a child's perspective, that will haunt and inform him until the end. It is a nice example of how an effective opening scene can simultaneously set a tone, develop sympathy for a main character, and (naively and simplistically but memorably) explain a contradictory set of motivations that will drive him throughout the film. He doesn't want to be like his father, so he will want to be straight. But he knows his father loved him, so he won't be quick to judge someone like his father; and he will be looking for a father figure throughout the film. The film is really not so much about drugs as about parenting and the relation of the child to the missing parent.

He finds a surrogate father, at first, in his racist boss at the DEA, where he works. The boss sends him on a mission precisely into the kind of life that his own father had warned him to avoid (by words, if not by example, except for the example of getting himself killed). Yet he continually reminds him that he is doing this effectively to save people like his father. This first surrogate father seems to be everything his father wasn't: educated, successful, and "clean." Still, just as Russell's father asked him to sit by while he committed a crime, Russell's boss asks him to turn away from an investigation when it gets political.

He finds a better father figure in a "preacher" cop, who warns him in the same tone as his father had, but unlike his father practiced what he preached. At the same time, he is one who clearly has faced the demon in himself that he is trying to exorcise in others. Effectively, the movie is about Russell (the lead character played well by Laurence Fishburne) learning to face up to the fact that nothing he does will redeem his father or bring him back, and growing up by not merely avoiding his father's sins but by passing through and beyond them. In the end, he is neither a "straight arrow" or a "lost soul" but is faced with a choice that he poses to the audience, in order to suggest that there are no easy answers to the existential questions faced by those who are caught up in the world that killed Russell's father. (In a subplot, he develops a relationship with a young hispanic boy whose mother is in effectively the same position as was his own father.)

On top of that, Russell is paired with a "brother" of sorts, a lawyer played by Jeff Goldblum, who is in many ways his mirror image. Unlike Russell, David (Goldblum) has everything: a beautiful family, a nice house, a good job. He doesn't do crime, like Russell's father, out of necessity but out of a fascination with the other side, with the criminal element and even (in a not entirely developed but intriguing sub theme) with the idea of being black (he has a black lover, he is fascinated nearly to the point of an erotic attraction by Russell - who he describes in action as a "beautiful beast"). Unlike Russell's father who hated the life of crime that he felt obligated to pursue, David gives up his family to pursue the dark life of crime for its own sake. It is against this "double" that Russell defines himself -- refusing in the end to be a criminal and insisting that he is still a cop.

Sure it's simplistic, but it's a fun and entertaining film, that plays with the psychology of motivation and with moral questions that are inevitable in the "war on drugs" (or the "war on terror," for that matter). The directing is solid and some scenes like the first one are quite good. The script is engaging and mostly clever, with convincing characterizations. The reversals in the story and the fact it uses a grand scheme to address highly personal issues of morality and choice are to be expected from a film that was co-scripted by Michael Tolkin -- who also wrote Altman's "The Player" and wrote and directed "The Rapture." There are some extraneous side plots here and there, and both the DEA and the mafia didn't seem very well developed or plausible. For that matter, the idea that with a little bit of luck and a charismatic "tough" attitude one can get to the top of the drug mafia food chain in a matter of weeks or months is sheer fantasy (of a sort that makes "Miami Vice" look realistic). Still, the fantasy elements are really subordinate to the personal story of a boy facing up the consequences and implications of a tragic childhood event. Worth seeing if you can get in to this kind of thing. December 6, 2006

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