GRIDLOCK'D (1997)

A vibrantly gritty lower-depths comedy about two hapless junkie thieves (Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth) who bum around Detroit like a couple of alley cats, torn between their desire to score and their desperation to kick. Making his debut as a writer-director, Vondie Curtis Hall shows a gift for back talk and confrontation, for the hardscrabble comedy of urban decay, and for an electric storytelling style that sometimes shades off into B-movie glibness. The two characters are tossed from one ugly government office to the next, a comedy of bureaucratic errors that escalates in fervor when the police mistake them for killers. The fun of the movie lies in the way that Shakur and Roth manage to seem feverishly alive amid all this manic-depressive running in place.

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