Sugar Hill (R)
‘Sugar Hill’ (R)
By Joe BrownWashington Post Staff Writer
February 25, 1994
BITTER WITH rage and grief, charged by a complex, restrained performance by Wesley Snipes, "Sugar Hill" mourns the decay of once-proud Harlem by tracing the drugs- and crime-fueled demise of a black family. The film is expensively, stylishly designed and filmed, suffused with a burnished sepia glow. But its torpid repetitiveness and eye-covering brutality make "Sugar Hill" grueling to sit through.
After a poignant credit montage of black-and-white photographs tracing the gradual decay of Harlem from '20s grandeur to '90s disgrace, "Sugar Hill" begins with a repellently vivid flashback. Young brothers Roemello and Raynathan Skuggs watch their beautiful mother shoot up -- she makes Raynathan, the eldest, pull the tourniquet. She convulses and dies before their helpless eyes.
Years later, the brothers are gangsters overseeing a heroin operation in their once-coveted childhood neighborhood, now a burnt-out jungle, selling the same poison that killed their mother and still enslaves their father.
Written by Barry Michael Cooper ("New Jack City"), the "Sugar Hill" scenario is Cain & Abel meet "Superfly": Younger but wiser Roemello (Snipes) meets a lovely woman, Melissa (Theresa Randle), and decides he wants to escape the crime and grime and "go home," wherever that may be. But he's mocked and sabotaged by hotheaded, envious Raynathan (Michael Wright), who impulsively instigates a bloody and vicious turf war.
Snipes is all withheld power and interior intensity as Roemello, eyes glowing fiercely in his impassive face. Twitchy and troubled, Wright is his polar opposite as loose cannon Raynathan, hair-trigger funny and just as instantly vicious. Randle registers strongly as Melissa, whose protective urban hardness is belied by her wounded eyes, while Clarence Williams III makes the ruined father's anguish unendurably visible. Yet the handful of white characters, including Abe Vigoda as a washed-out Mob figure, are cartoonishly drawn as racist puppetmasters.
Director Leon Ichaso doesn't flinch from the ugliness and squalor of drug depravation. But for a film that ostensibly deplores crime and violence, "Sugar Hill" sure makes the gangster life look glamorous. Snipes and Wright are sheathed in Armani and Versace and posed in velvety lush-life clubs and antique-choked, art-directed apartments. Several graphic scenes of torture and vengeance merely add to the movie's primer of inhuman brutality, and "Sugar Hill's" tragic, almost Shakespearean climax is undermined by a Band-Aid of a "positive" ending that rings patently and offensively false.
SUGAR HILL (R) -- Area theaters.
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