The film isn’t subtle about connecting the dots between its anti-heroes’ violence-infected lives and the overarching social causes that produce generations of poverty and violence. And Menace II Society is, on some level, about an entire community getting used to things no one should ever have to accept. Caine casually establishes that seeing his father kill somebody wasn’t an isolated incident it was something he got used to. That’s all it takes to get Tat to cross a line that doesn’t seem to mean much to either party. The defiant ex-convict all but dares Tat to pull the trigger. He might have post-traumatic stress disorder, but he doesn’t seem like someone who would ever visit a psychiatrist, let alone receive treatment. Like seemingly every other character in the film, he’s numb and jaded because of his experiences. As an ex-con recently released after a five-year bid, he isn’t frightened when staring down the barrel of a gun. The man Tat impulsively kills seems cavalier about the prospect of death. Tat ostensibly shoots the man point-blank in the chest over an outstanding debt, but the killing is primarily to make a point. Jackson, oozing charismatic menace) was a drug dealer who shot a client/buddy in front of a prepubescent Caine. An early flashback reveals that in the late 1970s, Caine’s drug-dealing father Tat (Samuel L. Murder and other forms of meaningless violence are in Caine’s bloodline, part of his parents’ poisoned legacy. Eventually, they catch up with each other. Like the protagonist of William Friedkin’s 1985 thriller To Live In Die In L.A., Caine spends Menace II Society chasing death.
The question isn’t whether he will die, but how and when. From the beginning, death seems to be stalking Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner), the film’s protagonist and narrator. It doesn’t happen to your grandmother at the end of a long struggle it happens to your brother, your cousin, your niece, or the guy down at the corner store-anyone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the Watts survivors of the Hughes brothers’ incendiary 1993 film Menace II Society, death isn’t an abstract concept it’s everywhere, as much a part of the atmosphere as oxygen.
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