Blucher One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Tafiet This movie is amazing. One of the best I've ever watched! Jada! Queen! Vivica! Kimberly! They are bad-ass women. Without them, this movie wouldn't have been as great. I wonder why this movie isn't placed up there as one of the greats? Actually, I know why but I'm not going to talk about that. Otherwise, F Gary Gray did a magnificent job in telling this story. I was moved by the characters' motivations and results of their actions. I enjoyed watching the sisterhood between these girls and how they so cared about each other. They had a real hard or die quality to them. Movies in this genre that are as intense, in terms of the thrill, usually feature men, exclusively. So, this was a pleasant surprise because it featured not only women but African American women. 10/10

sonya90028 Set It Off is an explosive drama about four young black women, who are best friends. Living in the Los Angeles ghetto, each of them struggles with economic and emotional hardships. All of them suffer deeply, due to injustices perpetrated against them by their employers, trigger-happy cops, and the welfare bureaucracy. Fed-up with how life has knocked them around, and desperate to escape the ghetto, the four friends decide to resort to robbing banks together.This film is very fast-paced, with gripping suspense throughout the course of the movie. There's scarcely a dull moment. This movie is overflowing with tire-screeching car chases, blazing gunfire, and volatile interactions between the characters. The breath-taking action sequences really draw you in to the precarious world, of the criminal quartet. It's good that Hollywood finally decided to make a film, that has African-American female characters who make such a deep impact. They're just as rough, vulgar, and determined to change their lives for the better, as any of the male characters are. They're deadly serious about being willing to risk their lives, to take up criminal activities. The women in the film, don't depend on men to determine their course of action. They know that it's up to them alone, to work together to accomplish their bank heists.The four actresses who played the main characters, all give strong performances. Especially Queen Latifah as the hardened butch lesbian, Cleo Simms. She really makes the viewer believe that Cleo can fearlessly handle just about anything, that she's up against. Jada Pinkett also gives a compelling performance as Stoney. Pinkett shows an amazing emotional range, and is able to convey the contradictory moods of Stoney with ease. Vivica Fox as Frankie, is vivid in her role, but not quite as charismatic as either Queen Latifah, or Jada Pinkett. Kimberley Elise as the desperate single mother, Tisean, gives a heartrending performance.This film crackles with a heady intensity, that's rare in films with women as the main characters. These sistahs prove that they are forces to be reckoned with, as they fight for their dreams in a male dominated world. This cutting-edge action film, delivers jolt-after-jolt of exciting entertainment.

Nick Dets I've never lived in the projects. I have in no way experienced the plight of the marginalized. I've never known what it's like to be kept below the line that divides those who should be educated and those who should be left in the dark. For that reason I, by no means, have any right to speak for those people. But after watching the 1996 movie "Set it Off," I can't understand why no one seemed to get offended at its ignorance about, and exploitation of, the lower class- in particular the struggling black communities of urban areas."Set it Off" is about four close-knit women who have all had tough breaks in life. They made the best out of growing up in the projects and became, for the most part, honest, hard-working and self-respecting young women. The story starts off with Francesca, a bank clerk, getting held up and witnessing a violent shoot out that her fear crippled her from possibly preventing. A by the numbers detective named Strode blames her for it, causing her to get fired. The story shifts to its main character Lida, Francesca's friend who is a janitor in an upper-class apartment building, soon learning she has to compromise all of her good traits just to break even in life. To help her little brother get some money for college, she gives in to her shady employer's sexual demands. When her brother is coincidentally mistaken for the bank robber by Strode, he is shot and killed with no apologies.The movie was off to a good start, but I quickly started noticing that its scenes were getting progressively dumber. First off all, Strode seems to be on every case that the L.A.P.D. has to offer. Being that I have heard much praise for this film, I was surprised when more and more coincidences started trying my patience. The movie started feeling like a predictable crowd-pleaser, although it was supposed to be a hard-hitting protest about why the lower class seems to have abandoned.Any high school or college writing class teaches that to evaluate something is to see how closely or effectively it comes to its intended mark. My problem with "Set it Off" is that it is unclear as to what its mark really is. It shakily walks the line between action movie and socially-conscious drama so much that I started to question how dumb does the screenwriter thought his audience was. Since there is an objective made early on in the script, that there must be a reckoning for the unfair treatment of these women (and the lower-class community at large), it is questionable when it starts to stray.In his three and a half star (out of four) review of the film, Roger Ebert calls it "observant and well-informed." Sure the film had some very relatable characters and situations, but the screenplay is far from "Observant and well-informed." If anything, the writing is histrionic. A realistic screenplay would have characters who were less heroic and aware of their exploitation. Sure Queen Latifah is fabulous as a gun-toting lesbian, but does such a character really represent underprivileged women? A competent screenplay also wouldn't rely on coincidences and action sequences to make its point.(1 and 1/2 out of 4)

midfieldgeneral After a lively if predictable opening bank-heist scene, 'Set It Off' plummets straight into the gutter and continues to sink. This is a movie that deals in nasty, threadbare stereotypes instead of characters, preposterous manipulation instead of coherent plotting, and a hideous cocktail of cloying sentimentality and gratuitous violence instead of thought, wit or feeling. In short, it's no different from 90% of Hollywood product. But it's the racial angle that makes 'Set It Off' a particularly saddening example of contemporary film-making. Posing as a celebration of 'sistahood', the film is actually a celebration of the most virulent forms of denigrating Afican-American 'gangsta' stereotype. The gimmick this time is that the gangstas are wearing drag. Not only does the film suggest that gangsterism is a default identity for all African Americans strapped for cash or feeling a bit hassled by the Man, it presents its sistas as shallow materialists who prize money and bling above all else. Worse, 'Set It Off' exploits the theme of racial discrimination and disadvantage simply as a device to prop up its feeble plot structure. Serious race-related social issues are wheeled on in contrived and opportunistic fashion in order to justify armed robbery, then they're ditched as soon as the film has to produce the inevitably conventional ending in which crime is punished, the LAPD turns out to be a bunch of caring, guilt-ridden liberals (tell that to Rodney King), and aspirational 'good' sista, Jada Pinkett Smith, follows the path of upward mobility out of the 'hood and into a world of middle-class self-indulgence opened up for her by her buppie bank-manager boyfriend. 'Set It Off' illustrates the abysmal state of the contemporary blaxploitation film, pandering to mindless gangsta stereotypes and pretending to celebrate life in the 'hood while all the time despising it. While the likes of 'Shaft' and 'Superfly' in the 1970s might have peddled stereotypes and rehashed well-worn plots, they had a freshness, an energy and an innocence that struck a chord with audiences of all races and still makes them fun to watch. 'Set It Off' wouldn't be worth getting angry over if wasn't a symptom of the tragic decline and ghettoisation of African-American film-making since the promising breakthrough days of the early 1990s.