When Quentin Tarantinos”Pulp Fiction” exploded onto the world’s screens in 1994, it became instantly and everywhere influential, inspiring dozens of similar cocktails of black comedy and violent crime: “2 Days in the Valley”, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Love and a .45” are just a few obvious examples.
None of these films, even the good ones, came close to matching the entertainment value or literary qualities of Tarantinos masterpiece, but their proliferation had a strange side effect: preventing critics and audiences from recognizing and appreciating the handful of post-Pulp Fiction crime films that actually where great.
In the years after “Pulp Fiction” a kind of cinematic Gresham’s law set in, where there were so many movies with guys with guns on their posters that they couldn’t be separated from each other. Autumn 1997, then screenwriter/director Jim Koufs”Gang related” came out, it was not only difficult to discern film from the countless other crime films that flooded the market, it was hard to distinguish it from others Tupac Shakur vehicle — the rapper was so prolific that “Gang Related” was his third posthumously released film that came out the year after the murder.
“Gang Related” was the last Shakur performance to hit the big screen, and one of the last gasps of several 1990s subgenres. Not only was it guilty in the context of all the post-“Pulp Fiction” Tarantino knockoffs; it also intersected with the 1990s explosion of “hood” movies that came in the wake of John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood” and The Hughes Brothers’ “Menace II Society,” playing as a kind of dark inversion of the buddy cop movies that had been dominant since 1987’s “Lethal Weapon.”
A late entry into several traditions that audiences, and especially critics, had by now had their fill of, “Gang Related” debuted to minimal business and mixed reviews. But sometimes the late films in a cycle can be among the best, because they are the ones most interested in and capable of truly examining, critiquing, and reinventing the conventions of the cycle—”Risky business” Appearing several years into the wave of ‘Porkys’-inspired teen sex comedies is perhaps the most obvious example. (Spike Lee’s own hood film, “Clocks“, is another.) “Gang Related” is a case in point, and 28 years after its release, the virtues we took for granted then seem both obvious and vital.
“Gang Related” follows two cops (Shakur and a delightfully sly James Belushi) who have come up with a huge racket: They steal drugs from LAPD warehouses, sell them on the street, then murder the buyers, take the money, and return the recovered drugs to the evidence locker. When they accidentally kill an undercover DEA agent, all hell breaks loose, as a massive federal investigation begins and the corrupt buddies—put in charge of the investigation and thus ironically tasked with hunting themselves—must find someone to pin the murder on before it can be traced back to them.
This is the premise of “Gang Related,” but not the story. That’s because, as was so often the case with 1940s film noir films — another tradition to which “Gang Related” owes a lot — “Gang Related” doesn’t just create a concept, it tells a story that continues to unfold from start to finish. The synopsis above only covers the first 20 minutes of the film; after that, Kouf continues to throw twist after twist into the mix, constantly drawing the viewer in with developments that are both emotionally affecting and thematically rich.
Without revealing any of these developments, since Kouf’s ability to keep the audience guessing is one of the film’s greatest pleasures, I’ll just say that each one builds on what came before to create a textured, complex and chilling portrait of institutional corruption – Belushi and Shakur may be the villains, but their behavior is seen less as an organic culture than an organic culture. a post-Daryl Gates, post-Rodney King LAPD and a society that values the pursuit of money above almost everything else.
Kouf’s script constantly pokes and prods at issues related to crime and consequences—unsurprisingly, the consequences tend to shift depending on the characters’ wealth and power—and his satirical commentary on class and politics grows in strength, power, and insight as the film progresses. The fascinating thing about Kouf’s scathing attack on the status quo is that he delivers it via a formula previously used primarily to protect it: the buddy cop movie.
Richard Donner’s “Lethal Weapon” films, the last of which hit theaters less than a year after “Gang Related,” represent the genre distilled to its purest form, depicting a pair of cops (Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) who operate without regard for the law in an “ends-justifies-the-means” series of comedic adventure values, where the total comic adventure comes from the railing for entertainment. the police. Like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan, Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs appeals not in spite of his unbridled violence but because of it – since most of us constantly find ourselves powerless in daily life, it’s fun to relate to a character who has nothing but power and exercises it without restraint and without reflection.
While the “Dirty Harry” films (especially the one Eastwood directed himself, “Sudden Impact”) traffic in a certain amount of moral complexity and ambiguity, the “Lethal Weapon” films strip the formula down to its primal essence, to the point where they became not just excuses for but celebrations of police brutality and civil rights violations of his review of his review of civil rights — as Jonathan pointed out to Rosenhalbaum. Weapon 3, a film that surprisingly achieved box office supremacy just a year after the Rodney King beating, the film could just as accurately have been titled “How to Have Fun in a Police State.”
“Gang Related” uses aspects of the “Lethal Weapon” formula as a template, but veers closer to “Dirty Harry” territory — and then goes beyond it — by depicting its buddies as morally vacant sharks, constantly on the move with no purpose other than self-preservation and the accumulation of a little extra cash. Kouf gets extra mileage out of his actors by casting against type; Seeing comic everyman Belushi as a nihilistic fascist and anti-police rapper Tupac Shakur as a cop (albeit one more criminal than the criminals he’s supposed to arrest) gives the whole film an extra sense of electric energy.
Much as “Gang Related” is an aberration in the buddy cop genre, it’s also a bit of an aberration in Kouf’s career — not that he was the kind of writer or director who was ever confined to one type of film. The main thing that his best films have in common is not the genre but that they are transcendent examples of their genre — as is the case with “Gang Related,” Kouf is rarely the first filmmaker to do whatever he does, but he’s often one of the best.
In the early 1980s, Kouf wrote a series of teen-oriented comedies that contained far more wit and energy than most of their brethren — the now-almost-forgotten “Up the Creek,” about a college river raft race, is pretty much wall-to-wall laughs, and 1985’s “Secret Admirer” stars an Ernst Lubitsch high school student. Among his other credits, ironically, are a pair of John Badham buddy cop films — “Stakeout” and “Another Stakeout” — that provide the genre’s more traditional satisfactions.
“Stakeout” in particular is a perfectly constructed entertainment machine, a structural marvel of action, comedy and romance that is a perfect example of its kind. And a year after “Gang Related,” Kouf returned to the buddy movie with another highly effective contribution — one of his last — in the genre’s classic form, the Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker vehicle “Rush Hour.”
The fact that Kouf is so good at writing buddy movies the traditional way is key to why “Gang Related” is so effective — it’s like when Robert Altman made “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” after spending decades directing TV westerns like “Bonanza” and “Maverick.” Kouf knows the conventions of the genre inside and out; he knows what works and why, and he knows how to twist the clichés into something real and potent. Kouf is as solid a Hollywood craftsman as anyone in the business (he co-wrote “National Treasure,” one of the more satisfying and clever entertainments of Jerry Bruckheimer’s 2000s output), but there’s something extra fun about seeing him apply his talents to a work as dark, nasty and brutal as “Gang-related.”
While the merits of “Gang Related” may have been less obvious when it got lost in the shuffle of 1990s genre films, now that those kinds of films are released in theaters with far less frequency, it’s hard to see how its greatness could ever have been ignored. A new Blu-ray from boutique label Cinématographe finally gives “Gang Related” a worthy one physical media release, featuring a pristine new 4K restoration from the original camera negative and hours of extra features; there’s also a beautiful companion booklet with great essays by Quatoyiah Murry, Brandon Streussnig, and modern noir expert Travis Woods.
It’s not only one of the best Blu-rays of 2025, but a reminder that time is the ultimate critic – and that ‘Gang Related’ has not only endured and stood the test of time, but gets better with each passing year.
“Gang Related” is currently available on Blu-ray from Cinematographer.
