"Clockers" (1995) - Movie Review

Spike Lee shows the brutal killings as the back drop for his titles and the crime scene police yellow tape with bodies losing its final soul before it left them long before when they started “clocking” as the slang term goes for drugs. With one of the producer as Martin Scorcese, this creative factory of Spike Lee carries the tone from that classic crime director. Lee uses the colours as a tool to realize the rawness in the society he shows to us. There are old policemen, drug lords, young men in the foot step of those lords and the kids gearing up as the next generation to follow those foot step. A cycle of mistakes.

It is the situation of the peer pressurized and power seeking youths killing each other to achieve it. A society needs acceptance and a human need to be accepted to feel complete. A reason for the death of individuality. In those zest for being in a clan and identified as somebody, Ronnie a.k.a Strike (Mekhi Phifer) is running small time distribution of drugs in his neighbourhood with his buddies. The real king Rodney (Delroy Lindo) godfathers him for his own good and stirs him up against a competitor who worked under him, Darryl Adams (Steve White). Strike meets up with his brother Victor (Isaiah Washington) and after that, the shoot out happens. Lee keeps us in dark on what exactly happened. Comes in Detective Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) and Detective Mazilli (John Turturo) to join in the gang of policemen inspecting the crime scene in a dangerous casualness and humour to be afraid of these men more than the gangsters. Even if it is their daily job which has made them that, it scares on how much it pushes the demons of one sparkling as humour with an underlying true intentions of those wickedness.

The suspense is the end to the plot but it is not the story. The treatment of the environment has the putrefied smell of survival in the crudest form possible. But in that there are people who breathe in and come out clean. The stereotypes become stereotypes when they want to and use it as an excuse for their ill fated dealings. Sometimes the real weapon to escape the dangers is to be judged for them. When everybody plays that, the tasks become difficult for the law. But the law is the part of the ecosystem in this place. It is not the corruption but is the twisting of it to turn the game as per the scenario. And in Detective Rocco we see the care he takes to sincerely solve a murder and the ambidextrous skill of doing it with subtle turn of tables when he had to bring in a kid who shoots a psychopathic gangster. Lee convinces the rules of the game in the streets of murder.

“They kill each other like a self cleaning oven”, one character says about the neighbourhood and it has been accepted as such. The routine, the bodies, the system are repetitive that the person involved is the only difference but to tell that person’s parents the news is still tragic. Lee uses technique of randomness, dulled down day and dialogue with raunchy wittiness to laugh and get scared in parallel. The best performance comes from Harvey Keitel. He and John Turturo wear their suits with a style and sincerity to be feared upon. Yet we like these guys. Of course we do, because Rocco is the only one who has the greatest heart to do the right things, or at least he tries his best. Sometimes it is softly crooked and cunningly improvised, but the pool he swims is not a holy water. And in Keitel’s Rocco, he knows what the situation can turn into and how it can be turned around for his best interest.

A youth has his neck up in the mess and a kid who follows around him has a disastrous ending of picking the gun up where the young guy is on the verge of dropping it in gaining his senses. Lee shoots that scene with a style and while appreciating it, the tragedy of another broken soul is slightly missed. And in the interrogation scene by Keitel it gets completed. Even when we are witnessing something eye to eye, nothing can be said about anything. And Lee uses it for his gain in making us do the math and coming to conclusions. The training of identifying the right and wrong, good and bad, angel and demons are echoed in thoughts of him in the final scene with Keitel’s character looking at the headlines of a newspaper in disarray for a moment. But he realizes and gets on his work, to attend another homicide.