`JUICE' PRESENTS A BLEAK PICTURE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 18, 1992                   TAG: 9201180306
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
`JUICE' PRESENTS A BLEAK PICTURE
Of all the films dealing with the problems that black people face today, "Juice" is the most bleak and hopeless.
Writer/director Ernest R. Dickerson, cinematographer for Spike Lee, John Sayles and others, gives his movie a striking visual style but viewers are going to come away from it remembering the story.
It begins slowly, and then becomes an urban nightmare revolving around four Harlem teen-agers. Q (Omar Epps) has a shot at a career as a rap deejay. His friend Raheem (Khalil Kain) has already abandoned a child. Steel (Jermaine Hopkins) is an overweight clown.
Bishop (Tupac Shakur) is the wild card. He deliberately provokes rival Puerto Ricans, assuming that his pals will bail him out. He idolizes James Cagney's Cody in "White Heat" and loves the fiery suicidal ending.
Then one of them gets a pistol.
The second half of the film is an inexorable spiral of violence and destruction, mostly self-destruction. Dickerson keeps the action focused so tightly on his main characters and their immediate neighborhood that his camera never looks up to consider any of the larger social issues. He doesn't blame racism or drug-use or economics for the problems these young men face.
"Juice" is a movie about black kids killing black kids. The violence is horrifying, brutal, unforgiving. As Dickerson apparently sees it, there is no reason to hope the situation will get better any time soon, and no end is in sight. `Juice': 1/2 A Paramount release playing at the Salem Valley 8. 94 min. Rated R for extremely strong language, violence, some sexual content.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB