Fresh (1994)
Directed by Boaz Yakin
Death and violence anger twelve year old drug courier Fresh, who sets his rival employers against each other.
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What critics compared Fresh to
Writer/director Boaz Yakin, who debuted with the gritty coming-of-age crime drama Fresh, and somewhere along the line detoured into fluff like Uptown Girls, relies too much on the swooshy hand-held ‘chaos cinema’ camerawork of recent vintage to generate mayhem, but the film also has a distinctly old-school Steven Seagal-circa-Out for Justice vibe that makes all that easier to tolerate.
As he did in Fresh, Yakin unfolds a puzzle that allows for Mei to manipulate her tormentors, and Wright to exact a brilliant revenge on his foes, by playing them off against each other.
Yakin wrote such movies as "The Punisher" (1989) and "The Rookie" (1990) before his impressive directorial debut with "Fresh," and for the first 25 minutes or so, he appears to have pulled off an unexpected coup with his latest single-syllable effort.
Yakin’s filmography is filled with evidence that his directorial skills (see: Titans, Fresh, A Price Above Rubies) are better than his writing skills (From Dusk Till Dawn 2, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, Prince of Persia), and Safe only serves as further evidence of this disparity.
Yakin started out in the ’80s writing action scripts for movies such as “The Punisher” and “The Rookie,” and jumped to directing with the pretty good “Fresh.”
He first made his bones in the film industry by writing scripts for The Punisher and The Rookie (Yakin would go on to direct lauded non-action films Fresh and Remember the Titans) and it is evident that dialogue is not a strong suit, with Safe filled with the usual tacky diatribes and bad puns which seem to sprout in action movie more than any other.
Some very smart people – Fresh and Price Above Rubies screenwriter Boaz Yakin, Transporter 1 &2 director Louis Leterrier , Oscar winners Caine and Freeman – work awfully hard at making Now You See Me as dumb as possible.
The script, by Ed Solomon (who wrote the original Bill & Ted and Men in Black movies), Boaz Yakin (the excellent urban drama Fresh, plus the disposable sequels to From Dusk Till Dawn and Dirty Dancing) and Edward Ricourt, believes in symmetry as much as in surprise, so it provides the Four Horsemen with four henchmen or pursuers.
But within the confines of a terribly predictable narrative, director Boaz Yakin (who made the extraordinary "Fresh" back in 1994 and then stumbled with 1998's "A Price Above Rubies") does a decent enough job of maintaining interest and building dramatic tension without getting overly mawkish about things.
The gradual thawing of suspicions on both sides holds few surprises, but the confidence of the football sequences is perhaps unexpected in Boaz (Fresh) Yakin's first studio picture.
The action on the field is convincingly staged (no "Any Given Sunday"-style operatics here) and Yakin, who directed the underappreciated "Fresh" and "A Price Above Rubies," finds a nice balance between the gridiron drama and the subplots about tensions in the community, in the school and even in the coaches' offices.
But director Boaz Yakin ("Fresh," "A Price Above Rubies") uses that predictability as a strength.
Bruckheimer's director, Boaz Yakin, is attempting to rebound from the critical and box-office disaster, A Price Above Rubies (which, in turn, was his follow-up to his much-lauded debut, Fresh).