Before he's able to drive away, cops swarm them inside their own vehicles with sirens and flashing lights Tiny, caught off-guard, frantically smashes into the cars parked in front of and in back of his, despite the officers' commands for him to exit the ride. The sequence begins like many others in the film: Jason and his crew are standing on a street corner at night, and one of them, Tiny, decides to jack the near whip. The parallels ring loudest, though, in a pivotal scene involving Jason's rambunctious friend Tiny (played by Clueless-era Donald Faison). Revisiting New Jersey Drive today, it's tough to watch Roscoe abuse his power by beating the hell out of Jason and not think about the officers who overpowered Eric Garner as he pleaded with them, repeatedly saying, "I can't breathe." Likewise, it's tough not to visualize Michael Brown's killer, Darren Wilson, when another one of Newark's white cops pushes a weaponless Jason into a cop car, unjustifiably says, "Fuck with me again and I'll blow your fucking head off," and then slugs him with a cheap-shot to the face. In one scene, he brutalizes Jason in a private interrogation room, in an effort to physically dissuade the teenager from snitching on the bigger, more powerful cop-"That's so you stay away from grand juries," he says after landing his final punch. Roscoe's evilness isn’t the least bit subtle, due to how Gomez overwrites him into a one-note monster with a badge. The key narrative difference between Mean Streets and New Jersey Drive is that the latter has a centralized villain: Emile Roscoe (Saul Stein), the hulking, malevolent police officer who's made it his sole mission to terrorize Jason and his friends. Jason and Midget have a dynamic reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's 1973 film's Charlie and Johnny Boy Corley channels Harvey Keitel's calmer, more level-headed demeanor, and Casseus repurposes Robert De Niro's hot-headed explosiveness. Lee, being a fan of Laws of Gravity, recruited Gomez to make a bigger (read: $5 million) picture for Gramercy Pictures, a subsidiary of Universal for his part, Gomez conceived a rap-centric Mean Streets for the 1990s. New Jersey Drive was Gomez's follow-up to his 1992 indie breakthrough Laws of Gravity, a Brooklyn-set crime drama that earned an Indie Spirit Award nomination for Best Picture the film's budget was a humble $35,000. New Jersey Drive comes from the '90s wave of "hood movies" with killer original hip-hop soundtracks, and much like its peer in that category, Ernest Dickerson's unfairly neglected-by-time film Juice (1992), it's just as worthwhile as Menace II Society (1993) and the aforementioned Boyz n the Hood. Other films have touched on the issue: Do the Right Thing (1989), Boyz n the Hood (1991), Fruitvale Station (2013), this year's Straight Outta Compton, But none have done it as thoroughly head-on as New Jersey Drive.
The disturbing black-teenagers-versus-the-police realities seen in the film, executive-produced by Spike Lee, were prevalent in '95 in today's post-Ferguson society, where Quentin Tarantino's currently being bullied and threatened by police organizations for labeling the deaths of innocent unarmed black men as "murders," those realities are even more in-vogue. His mother's reply: "Oh, you need a reason to get shot nowadays?"ĭoes any of this strike a familiar chord? Of course it does.Ĭelebrating its 20th anniversary this year, writer-director Nick Gomez's New Jersey Drive was ahead of the curve, yet it also wasn't. Jason replays the events back for her, omitting the part about the stolen car and emphasizing the fact that the cops shot at them despite no justifiable provocation. The next morning, his mother, Rene (Gwen McGee), inquires about Ronnie's hospitalization. They fire multiple gunshots into the car, sending Ronnie to the hospital with near-fatal bullet wounds, even though Jason and Ronnie didn't receive any warning or a chance to stop themselves. Thomas) jack one night belongs to a cop, and the Newark Police Department's Auto Theft division responds aggressively. But the car that he and his pal Ronnie (Koran C. High school is a bust, since it takes more than 30 minutes to get through the building's faulty metal detectors, a duration that routinely dissuades Jason from waiting in order to attend classes instead, he hits the block with his friends, breaks into strangers' automobiles, and goes joyriding. They live in Newark, New Jersey, which in the '90s was negatively known as "the car theft capital of the world," a reputation Midget and Jason strengthen on a daily basis.
In the 1995 film New Jersey Drive, streetwise teenager Midget (Gabriel Casseus) has every right to say that to his best friend, 17-year-old Jason (Sharron Corley). "It's open season on the black man out here!"
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