Set It Off (1996)
Directed by F. Gary Gray
Four inner-city Black women, determined to end their constant struggle, decide to live by one rule — get what you want or die trying. So the four women take back their lives and take out some banks in the process.
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What critics compared Set It Off to
The film’s patronizing nod to diversity — token thieves of assorted ethnic types — are insulting enough to make one nostalgic for the ghetto vulgarity of Set It Off (1996), a black feminist heist film in which Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett belonged to a quartet of inner-city black chicks who committed robbery because of each one’s deprivation.
(Of the very few all-female heist movies in existence, none has aimed for this sort of gloss and glamour: they’ve been rougher, like “Set It Off,” or teen camp, like “Sugar & Spice.”)
Then, in 1996’s Set It Off , Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, Jada Pinkett, and Kimberly Elise played hard-luck blue-collar women who become bank robbers to make ends meet.
Where The Town faulters is in its story (which is one that we’ve all seen before), the film that it most resembles is F Gary Gray’s 1996 all-female thriller Set It Off, to which is shares frequent identical plot turns and stylistic similarities.
Reference points include the great 90’s robbery movie Set It Off mentioned in an early, electrifying bank heist scene…
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The habitat's small crew includes radio operator Queen Latifah , from “ Set It Off ,” who is on hand to illustrate Hollywood's immutable law that the first character to die is always the African American.
It’s “Girls Gone Wild” meets the female-gangster picture “Set It Off.” Korine has cooked up an impressionistic bacchanal of what spring break has become and those who made it that way – college girls, proving to each other and themselves that they’re as bad and promiscuous as any frat boy hip hop.
Instead, F Gary Gray (whose CV includes Friday and Set It Off ) plays it rather more straight, following Corey Hawkins’s Dr Dre, Jason Mitchell’s Eazy-E, and O’Shea Jackson Jr’s Ice Cube on a pulsating rags-to-riches journey involving all the usual rock-pic elements: talismanic recording sessions, boisterous concerts, riotous parties (replete with unquestioned misogyny), corrupt managers etc.
They helped shepherd it into existence and into the hands of director F. Gary Gray (who's worked with both previously, in Set It Off and Friday) and writers Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff.
As with his classic caper film, “ Set It Off ”, Gray briskly handles the film’s 147-minute running time.
But it's directed with some grace and snap by F. Gary Gray (of the excellent Set It Off, the lackluster if shrewdly cast The Negotiator, and the failed Vin Diesel entry A Man Apart earlier this year), with dialogue by Donna and Wayne Powers that sounds as if they had some laughs while typing it.
Director F. Gary Gray (Set It Off and A Man Apart) gives the adventure a glossy, whiz-bang updating, but he cant solve Wahlberg's phlegmatic style.