Judgment night5/20/2023 To be honest there are big red flags straight away with Judgment Night. They are then forced to flee for their lives through a neighbourhood that they had previously pretended didn’t exist, and where the cops don’t even bother to show up. Down here the RV accidentally hits someone who seems to have been shot, and the four friends subsequently witness a murder carried out by local mobster Fallon (Denis Leary). Due to Chicago traffic, Ray’s RV ends up late for the fight, and Ray takes a diversion off the freeway and into the darker areas of the city. We start off with Frank (Emilio Estevez) being picked up from middle-class suburbia by his childhood friends Mike (Cuba Gooding JR) and Ray (Jeremy Piven) and his little brother John (Stephen Dorff) with the intention of a night spent cutting loose at a boxing match. This was a year before Pulp Fiction (1994) would change cinema forever, and so Judg ment Night ended up a box office disappointment with barely 12 million at the box office, straight-to-video status in many countries, and a shooting controversy at a theatre in New York which further hurt its reputation. Back in 1993 however, the world wasn’t quite ready. The actual pitch of “ Deliverance in the city” is a strong one, and the kind of thing which leads to indie breakout success these days. The screenplay did the Hollywood rounds and was rewritten extensively, with even John Carpenter being involved at one point, and the eventual final credit being given to Lewis Colick. The original script by Kevin Jarre actually dated back to 1989 and was by all accounts a much darker and in-your-face affair. Whether it made that point successfully or not is open to debate, but it’s possible Judgment Night was just too mainstream to ever really deal with serious issues head-on, and at the same time perhaps too raw for the blockbuster crowd. The year after these two, in 1993, something else came along that perhaps had a chance at really making a point on how the underclass were being consistently ignored. ![]() You could see it in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991) and it was present in the glorious Candyman (1992). People will make out it is kind of revolutionary when it happens now, but during the early ‘90s there was an effort to push a certain level of social consciousness into genre cinema.
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