Clockers [DVD] [1996] [2017]

Product Description

A hard-hitting Spike Lee film with a very disturbing opening credits sequence. Strike (Mekhi Phifer) is a Clocker (24-hour drug dealer) who becomes implicated in the murder of a rival after a tip off. Two cops investigate, Mazilli (John Turturro - looking for a quick solution) and Rocco (Harvey Keitel - looking for the truth). When Strike's brother confesses to the shooting, Rocco decides to find the real killer.

.co.uk Review

Based on the riveting bestseller by Richard Price, this 1995 crime drama was directed by Spike Lee with such authority and authenticity that it has the hyper-real quality of a stylised documentary. Fully capturing the thoroughly researched detail of Price's novel, the film focuses on Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a young, ambitious "clocker"--or drug dealer--who works the streets of his New York housing project, selling drugs for a local supplier named Rodney (played with ferocious charisma by Delroy Lindo). Just as Strike is struggling to get away from his dead-end life of crime, another dealer is murdered in a fast-food restaurant and local detectives (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro) consider Strike the primary suspect. In cowriting the script with novelist Price, Lee uses this murder mystery to explore the plague of s and black-on-black crime in America's inner cities, in which drugs and death are familiar routines of daily life. The film doesn't pretend to offer solutions, nor does it dwell on the problem with numbing insistence. Rather, this taut, well-acted film takes the viewer into a world often hidden in plain --a world where options seem nonexistent for youth conditioned to have little or no expectation beyond a probable early death. Lee and Price are deadly serious in handling this volatile subject (which incorporates racism, powerless law , and political indifference), but Clockers is also blessed with humor, in, and humanity. It's one of Lee's most confidently directed films, signaling a creative maturity that Lee continued to develop throughout the 1990s. --Jeff Shannon