There was a period of time in my childhood when I was convinced that Laurence Fishburne is the greatest actor alive.  Decades later, I’m once again being swayed to believe that superlative, except now my supporting evidence has less to do with his work in the high-premise sci-fi films The Matrix & Event Horizon than it has to do with his more complex character work in Bill Duke’s Deep Cover & John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood.  Fishburne was well rewarded in his 1990s heyday, including an Oscar nomination for his brutish portrayal of Ike Turner in What’s Love Got to With It? and an Independent Sprit Award for Best Male Lead in Deep Cover.  To my knowledge, Event Horizon earned no Oscar buzz to speak of in 1997, which would have disappointed me to know at age 11.  Since then, Fishburne has slipped into the Great Actor void, mostly working in TV and in IP extenders when studios should be churning out a new Awards Bait star vehicle for him every year the same way we pamper other living greats like Glenn Close, Annette Benning, and Meryl Streep.  It’s a shame, especially once you get cynical about how other Black legends like Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, and even Deep Cover director Bill Duke have been left to simmer on the same Hollywood backburner.

It might seem naive to discuss an undercover cop thriller like Deep Cover in these prestige-acting terms, but it really does give Fishburne a lot of room to show off.  If nothing else, it somehow finds an entire new layer of self-conflict to the moral dilemma of a cop having to commit crimes to stop them, despite the already long-bald tires on that trope.  We open with a flashback to the cop’s childhood trauma on A Very Shane Black Christmas, when his addict father was gunned down in front of him while robbing a liquor store for gift & drug money.  The rest of the movie is set in the New Jack City 1990s, where Fishburne’s childhood trauma under the violence & desperation of addiction has curdled into furious disgust with the crack epidemic that has rattled Los Angeles.  In order to take down the white ghouls at the top of the ladder who supply drugs to the Black community, Fishburne allows himself to be recruited to go undercover as one of their business partners.  In the process, he gets especially close to a scummy yuppie lawyer played by Jeff Goldblum, whose “condescending infatuation with everything Black” makes their already volatile workplace relationship even more explosively tense.  Most of Fishburne’s conflict is internal, though.  He is handling, selling, and profiting off the one evil he has dedicated his life to avoiding, and every moment of that hypocritical turmoil weighs heavy in his angry, self-hating eyes.

Deep Cover is currently in print as a Criterion Collection Blu-ray, but it entered my house as a 20-year-old thrift store DVD.  That dichotomy is a perfect snapshot of where it lands on the prestige/trash spectrum, stealthily operating as a high-style art film that’s gone undercover as a thriller-of-the-week marquee filler.  Bill Duke’s directorial instincts deserve just as much credit for its impact as Fishburne’s acting chops, updating classic noir tropes for Spike Lee’s America.  Fishburne’s overly verbose narration track is classic noir at least, and Duke’s vision of Los Angeles is one where every alley spews a volcano of mysterious urban steam into an atmospheric haze of neon reds & blues (often alternating from the tops of passing cop cars).  The editing rhythms are chopped into jerky stops & jumps, feeling more DJ’d than traditionally spliced.  Its aesthetic indulgence in post-MTV style only gets more intense from there the further its characters lose themselves in the momentum of cocaine psychosis – a style that eventually came full circle when the movie was marketed with a tie-in music video featuring Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre.  It’s a cool video promoting a very cool movie, but what I ended up cherishing most about Deep Cover was the amount of screenpsace it reserved for watching one our greatest living actors be great at acting.  It’s shocking how few other movies afford Fishburne the same generosity.

-Brandon Ledet