"Dead Presidents"

 "Dead Presidents" is the story of a young man who gets involved in too many complicated things and it all goes way over his head.  It is a very, brutal and intense film, and you are able to take a little bit of a sad story than I recommend to watch it. During the 1960s a young adult named Anthony can't take anymore school, so he drops out and works petty crimes at the billiard hall with the owner who has no legs. When he finally gets tired of that lifestyle, he decides to enlist in the army. Since the Vietnam war going on, he goes in and becomes mentally unstable due to the atrocities. When he gets back home, his girlfriend has had his child and he tries to support her and his daughter. Unfortunately, the food place with the part time job that he had been contending to has gone bankrupt, leaving him with no job, no money, no food, and no choices. His desperate search descends into a downward spiral of war flashbacks and his overall loss on morality.

The film has characters who eventually resort to really desperate measures in order to survive. One of the focuses in the film were Anthony Curtis, played by Larenz Tate, a young African-American in the late sixties hanging with his other young friends Jose, and Skippy. All of them have finished high school and hope to enter some sort of employment  However two things require Anthony to grow up way before his time, the impregnation of his girlfriend Juanita and also him volunteering to go to Vietnam to fight the cause for America in the war. 

 One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the character Skippy, played Chris Tucker. Skippy was a childhood friend whose life ends up being worse off then Anthony's. He becomes addicted to heroin, has flashbacks almost all the time, and is about ready to self-destruct. Chris Tucker does a great job bringing out Skippy's as this tortured character.  

The film's war sequences are super gruesome. The film has Anthony jumped back into the world four years after Vietnam, where viewers witness the domestic turmoil the war brought upon Anthony and Juanita. The violence between these two characters in the film is very ugly. It is very believable, when they argue and fight with each other, viewers can really feel the two's hate for one another. 

The film's war sequences were very gruesome, but not as much as the bank robbery's. During the bank robbery scene a part of you hopes that Anthony and the rest of the characters involve steal the money, get off scott-free, and never being seen or heard from again. However, this movie had a message to convey and audiences would have not understood nor got it if that happened, One by one each character dies, Skippy's being the worst due to an heroine overdose. Until the only one left is Anthony who is caught by the proper authorities and later trialed, receiving a fifteen to life jail sentence. I think the final scene of the movie is very important, Anthony is sitting on the bus on his way to prison and he is contemplating. Questioning how a country he served for and gave up his life for, give him such a harsh sentence and not a second chance at life. Vietnam took away his first chance, and now America was taking away his second. 

Dead Presidents has many underlying messages but one of the most important ones of the film was that the Vietnam war veterans deserved way better than what they received when they came home. The government seemed to have done them no favors and granted them no opportunities. It is very sad, especially since people like Anthony come home to below poverty lifestyles and need government support just to be able to survive. Despite whatever circumstance that might have brought them to join the army, they are still human beings, and no human being should live their lives regretting something they thought was honorable and worth fighting for. 

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