Gang Related Reviews

It's a bad day for bad cops Divinci (James Belushi) and Rodriguez (Tupac Shakur), who've been quietly supplementing their paychecks by shaking down and murdering drug dealers. The smooth-talking player they just killed turns out to have been an undercover agent, and they have to come up with plausible murderer before the DEA, the FBI or God knows who else stumbles onto their little sideline. Naturally, everything that can possibly go wrong does, miring our heroes -- for want of a better term -- in a deeply black comedy of errors that just keeps tightening the screws. In his last role, the late Tupac Shakur shows once again that he had considerable natural talent as an actor, and while Jim Belushi is always in danger of sliding from sleaze into shtick, he always pulls back. "What's the worst possible case scenario?" the laid-back Divinci asks, after yet another bombshell has shattered their not especially well-laid plans. "We get arrested, go to jail, get sent to the electric chair, die and go to hell!" sputters Rodriguez. That's more or less the size of it, and at a time when "black comedy" too often means weird but not very funny, writer-director Jim Kouf manages to make it all bitterly amusing. His worldview is bracketed by throwaway cynicism and karmic optimism: The police department is full of uniformed vigilantes with variously self-serving agendas, the judicial system is a disorganized mess, murdering scumbags go free, innocent men are framed, undercover cops get popped by their brothers in blue. And so it goes, right up to the grimly perfect O. Henry ending.