Love N The Hood

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: POETIC JUSTICE

WRITER-DIRECTOR: JOHN SINGLETON

THE BOTTOM LINE: A promising young director strikes out in a new direction -- and strikes out.

Two questions now arise: Was John Singleton's first film, Boyz N the Hood, a lucky accident? Or is his second, Poetic Justice, an unlucky one? Too soon to say, of course, since Singleton, the youngest person (and only black) to receive simultaneous Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, is still in his 20s, with most of his career ahead of him.

What must be said is that the new movie is simply awful: poorly structured, vulgarly written, insipidly directed, monotonously performed. This, of course, is not the contrast to his taut, persuasively realistic earlier work that Singleton wanted to strike.

Boyz was essentially a story of young men trapped in an unyielding ghetto environment, pretty much hopelessly waiting for its endemic, random violence to strike them down. In his new movie he obviously wanted to explore emotional territory new to him. It is about a young woman named Justice (Janet Jackson) in the same setting who is doing her best to keep her options open and her hopes up. She's a hairdresser who finds psychological escape in the poetry she scribbles (actually it is Maya Angelou's work) while mourning the loss of a boyfriend gunned down in her presence in the movie's opening, and most arresting, sequence. Quite clearly, she also dreams of making a real escape from the hood.

| Lucky (Tupac Shakur), an amiable postal worker, does not at first seem the ideal partner for that enterprise. But he too has compelling reasons to break out, and a dream of redemptive creativity roughly analogous to hers: he wants to be a rapper. When they and another couple are thrown together on a weekend trip to Oakland, California, in a post-office van, edginess slowly gives way to an understanding that survives even a sudden lurch toward the tragic.

This situation and this relationship are both rooted in traditional romantic comedy, and it would have been interesting (to say the least) if Singleton could have imposed its generic conventions on this unlikely milieu. But that's beyond him. He doesn't offer any scene that convincingly suggests the kind of authentic mutual attraction that might overcome the couple's superficial differences. He doesn't know how to coax a performance out of Jackson, who relates to the camera lens as if it were a mirror. He never finds a way either to put an interesting spin on the incidents of the journey or to link them dynamically. And he doesn't know how to turn a graceful romantic line or how to put real snap into a comic one; his dialogue is mainly street epithets mumbled or run together incomprehensibly.

Almost everything about this movie feels like a first draft -- unfelt, unformed, unfinished. And it's not entirely Singleton's fault. As it so often does, Hollywood has mistaken bright promise for full-fledged talent, rushing in to indulge a young artist's self-indulgences, giving him everything he wants but withholding the one thing he needs most: firm but sympathetic challenges to his assumptions, an insistence on rethinking and rewriting until he knows what he wants to say and how to say it right.