Gangsta films rise or fall on their credibility; fortunately for this crime drama, the convincing cast members don't seem like hip-hop thugs from Central Casting. On Oct.10, 1991, three young hoodlums reflect on their childhood friendship and set aside their current estrangement to face a crew of dope-dealers. Headed for an ambush devised by their boss, Benny (Clarence Williams lll), the buddies Tristan (Allen Payne), E-Bone (William Johnson) and Money (Aaron D. Spears) decide to go out in a blaze of glory. There had originally four musketeers, but Benny had recently ordered a hit on their buddy Simon (Michael Bear Taliferro). Tristan starts a film-long flashback by recalling how this criminal quartet had quickly graduated from playing hoops in Roxbury, Mass., to growing marijuana and peddling it to classmates. It wasn't so long ago that Benny had sensed their initiative and groomed the four delinquents as street traffickers. Tristan, in addition to racketeering skills, had demonstrated business savvy by investing in legitimate businesses like his uncle's barbershop. Greedy E-Bone, however, upped the foursome's ante and steered his partners from commerce into homicidal hostile takeovers. Uncomfortable with his protégées' ambition, Benny eventually shut down their Bluehill Avenue turf and requested they open shop in Rhode Island — where Benny, affiliated with corrupt law enforcers, plotted against his four exiled amigos. The dividing-and-conquering cops planted suspicions within Tristan's crew, evaporating their solidarity. Then Benny ordered Simon's drug-addicted father, Twinkie (Marlon Young), to ice his own offspring, because Simon had functioned as Tristan's bodyguard. Aware that E-Bone had cooperated with the cops and that Benny had been planning to neutralize any competition, Tristan enters his final showdown with a heavy heart. Although one can't deny Craig Ross Jr.'s flair for ratcheting up violence, the writer-director is less persuasive at dramatizing quieter crises of conscience. Despite chinks in his screenplay's construction, Ross Jr.'s cautionary tale shows the cost of the seductive lure of easy money. --Robert Pardi
