The grisly, graphic photos shown in succession of young black men shot in the head, a litany of corpses, opens Spike Lee's compelling "Clockers." It is based on a gritty Richard Price novel and it is far removed from the world of "Boyz N' The Hood" or "Menace II Society" - this time, Spike Lee focuses on the projects ("The Nelson Mandela Homes") and the drug dealers running the streets with little impressionable kids watching them. It is a business with the police always around the corner, strip searching them much to the embarrassment of families looking on.
The clockers are the drug dealers and many of them do not partake - they just sell and usually to wealthy white kids coming in to their Brooklyn neighborhood. Strike (Mekhi Phifer) is our focus, the main clocker working for Rodney Little (Delroy Lindo), the drug lord who has a grocery store that is a front for selling drugs. Rodney means business, intimidating but quiet and caring for Strike whom he sees as his "son." Yet most fathers never ask their sons to commit murder and yet Rodney asks Strike to kill a rival cocaine dealer working at Ahab's Restaurant. This is meant as a promotion, to get away from the "bleachers" and move up in the organization (one wonders how far up the food chain Strike can go). Meanwhile, Errol Barnes (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), a murderous enforcer for Rodney, walks the streets like some sort of ghost with haunting eyes and has no problem scaring anyone in his path (his past with Rodney is shown in one of the most harrowing passages in the entire film). The cocaine dealer at Ahab's is shot dead and it is Strike's older brother (Isaiah Washington) who confesses to the murder but did he do it or is he protecting his troubled brother? We never quite get the impression that Strike is a violent 19-year-old despite owning a gun.
"Clockers" also deals with the racist police detectives (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro) who visit every crime scene and crack jokes, sort of gallows humor. Rocco (Keitel) and his partner (Turturro) have a shot of alcohol while driving to the usual violent crime scene - it is their duty and you feel that the police never catch a break anyway. Their view of the projects and drug dealers is that the residents, namely the clockers, are only killing themselves with no end in sight - self-imposed genocide. This is a slightly different view than the other inner city tales of L.A. and you also get the feeling that the drug dealers share that view yet they can't help themselves. Only Strike may see some sort of future if he's willing to pursue it and part of it is his fascination with trains.
"Clockers" gets a little too entangled with the murder investigation that plays like a police procedural. Nothing wrong with that since it practically replicates the novel's same plot but it is something that infringes the narrative, especially Strike's story that could've used more oomph. I was more absorbed by the depiction of a wasted way of life, both from the cops' and the clockers' point of view, and how it is an endless recycling of violence and lack of justice and that should have stayed on track. Strike tries to help one kid from facing the same wasted life, to deter him from the "adults" and their illegal business. He might have succeeded, or we can only hope.
