Judgment Night

Judgment Night (1993)

Runtime: 110 minutes

Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Starring: Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Jeremy Piven, Stephen Dorff, Denis Leary

From: Largo/JVC

Here's another film I saw as a kid but the last viewing was back in the 90's, so it was long overdue for me to watch it again. The Letterboxd review is below:

Here's another random movie that I was reminded of due to a messageboard conversation. This happened last month but on Tuesday I found the DVD of the film (put out in 1998 by Goodtimes Video! I laugh as I remember the now defunct company from their VHS days) in my collection so I watched it last night. Note that I saw this movie two times in the 90's, but that was it and my memories of the film were faint.

The plot is not too complex: it's another movie set in the span of one night and there are four yuppies (Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven) who go to a big boxing match in Chicago. They go into the city in an RV (modern and hip for the early 90's... it has a Nintendo Entertainment System console complete with the Zapper light gun) that Piven's character got for the night after some sweet talking. Really, you can guess the types of roles that all four men play as it's what you'd expect from all of them; I presume that most of Jeremy's roles are “smarmy A-hole”.

They experience a Chicago traffic jam (I was born and grew up in Illinois so even though I did not live in Chicago or its many suburbs, I still have experienced them before and they're no good) so they get off the freeway and-surprise, surprise-they get lost in “a bad part of town”. They see a gang leader (Denis Leary) kill a man who wronged him and as the quartet are witnesses, he and the few henchmen he's with (one of whom became better known later on as Everlast) go through some pretty sketchy areas of Chi-Town to silence them.

The movie has some contrivances but for the most part, you can explain how Leary and gang can always find the protagonists... basically, the protagonists do some dopey things. It is a “class struggle” sort of thing as it's men who have done decently enough in life vs. the more blue collar types in the gang who felt like they had to do such acts to earn their money... then of course both sides interact with the poor people who live in those run-down areas of Chicago that the police doesn't really care about, as the movie states more than once.

While I wouldn't call it great I was at least entertained by the story, all the moments where the heroes run from the villains and go through several different setpieces (some of them pretty tense), and how the characters all interacted with each other. Leary was fun as the big bad guy. And yes the violence was cool. So, it was an acceptable way to spend an evening, nothing more and nothing less.

To think that a movie many consider is “fine” at best produced a soundtrack that is much more highly regarded, in the large number of famous acts that contributed but that all the songs were combos of rock and rap acts, years before that became a hot trend-good or not that's up to you-for awhile. The songs on the soundtrack are all pretty rad to me.

Oh, and I should say that when I lived in Illinois I one day did get off a busy freeway and drove through a sketchy area of Chicago. I ended up fine and it was in the afternoon but it was more awkward than anything else, as for like 45 minutes I saw no one who even closely resembled me-a dorky white man-and I stuck out like a sore thumb.