Deep Cover

Russell Stevens watched his father shot during a robbery when he was a boy. Now he is a policeman. A federal prosecutor gives him an undercover assignment: get inside a drug network. He changes identity, starts dealing and finds he is good at it. John, the lawyer who becomes his partner, treats the whole thing as a career opportunity. The subject is not drugs but how the state chooses its own war. What emerges at the end is simple and hard: the target was never the name at the top, because that name is politically protected. All of Russell's work sits as a line item in someone's ledger. The form is hard and blue. Los Angeles at night, cramped apartments, neon. A narrating voice runs throughout, using the genre template while hollowing it out. Its legacy outside cinema is better known. The track named after the film was made by Dr. Dre and became Snoop Doggy Dogg's first recording; it circulated far more widely than the film and holds its own place in the rap history of the nineties. Laurence Fishburne plays the policeman and Jeff Goldblum the lawyer. Bill Duke directs. Who it is for: viewers who like nineties American crime films and genre work about identity. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a clean moral outcome; the film clears nobody.