SET IT OFF (54)

Directed by: F. Gary Gray

Starring: Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Blair Underwood

The Pitch: Four inner-city women turn to bank robbery as a way of making ends meet.

Theo Sez: The least irritating Sisterhood paean in a long time, probably because - unlike sappy no-brainers like BOYS ON THE SIDE and HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT - the female bonding isn't just pandering but actually has a point, namely the contrast between the ghetto girls' mutual supportiveness and the violent machismo of their (largely unseen) male counterparts. In using the women to tweak the stereotypical excesses of gangsta culture - the snarls of "Nigga" and the Godfather / Doggfather obsession (the casting of Dr. Dre in a minor role is no accident) - the film becomes an unspoken morality tale, a warning of the perils its heroines must avoid on the long road from the ghetto towards buppiedom. As a film it rambles, wanting - like DEAD PRESIDENTS last year - to be an epic (perhaps because the small-scale 'hood movie has become something of a cliche), and showing its lack of imagination in, for example, making the bank robberies increasingly sober and downbeat, style faithfully reflecting plot, when it might have been more subtle to do the opposite, save the whip-pans and exciting music for the later robberies to show the girls edging ever closer to the abyss of gangsta glamour. Perhaps it doesn't really know what it wants, celebrating female resilience - as opposed to macho recklessness - but also trying for heroines with Attitude, chicks you can stand up in the theatre and whoop along with. The early scenes are the best, setting out the impossibility of life for those at the wrong end of the world's richest society and suggesting - as with many 'hood movies - that the New Black Cinema is (or can be) the closest American films will get to Italian neo-realism.