Ernest Dickerson's 1998 Neo Noir Ambushed Is a Solid Little Thriller, Albeit One a Little Heavy on Black People Hugging Little Nazis
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Ernest Dickerson’s directorial career got off to an extraordinary start with the blistering 1992 crime movie masterpiece Juice. Dickerson’s debut introduced movie audiences to a uniquely gifted, charismatic young actor and rapper named Tupac Shakur (Nothing But Trouble), who delivered a career-defining performance as hot-tempered sociopath Roland Bishop.
When Dickerson made the leap to directing he’d already made an indelible mark on film as the cinematographer of early Spike Lee joints She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo Better Blues and Jungle Favor in addition to such Reagan-era films of note as Brother From Another Planet, Krush Groove and Eddie Murphy Raw.
That’s extremely impressive! If you have not seen Juice do so immediately! It’s quite good! Dickerson followed it up with the Most Dangerous Game adaptation Surviving the Game, which I really need to get around to seeing, because it very much looks like the kind of thing I dig, and the lean and mean 1995 horror comedy Demon Knight, a rock solid feature-film adaptation of Tales From the Crypt.
Dickerson eventually did what many veterans who know how to talk to actors and where to put the camera do: he moved to television, where he has been working more or less non-stop for the last quarter century on prestigious shows like The Wire, Treme, ER and Law & Order in addition to stuff like Stargate: Universe and Bosch: Legacy.
In 1998 alone Dickerson directed three movies that debuted on television, two of which starred Courtney B. Vance and dealt with racism and the police. Blind Faith, which debuted on Showtime, dealt with a 1957 murder involving a closeted black gay teenager and his homophobic police officer father.
Alas, actress Virginia Madsen is not in Blind Faith so I will probably never watch it. The same cannot be said of the other Courtney B. Vance television movie about racism and the police Dickerson put out the same year, Ambushed.
In Ambushed, Madsen very capably plays Lucy Monroe, a police officer in a sleepy, racist Southern town who is romantically involved with controversial colleague Jerry Robinson (Vance).
Jerry is introduced watching a video of a child we know instantly is his dead son. The grieving parent who can’t stop obsessing over haunting reminders of a dead child’s all too brief existence is a groaning cliche that can be done well or done poorly.
Like everything in Ambushed, this ubiquitous trope is handled well, with consummate professionalism that can’t quite hide how familiar so many of the film’s individual parts feel.
We open with a father and son on a long, pleasant drive. The father is played by William Sadler, the star of the first episode of Tales from the Crypt as well as Demon Knight. That’s an early indiction that he will turn out to be something much more sinister and dangerous than a loving father.
Sadler’s patriarch is then ambushed by an unknown assailant. He’s pumped full of bullets but his son is left unharmed if understandably traumatized.
At the police station we learn that the dead man was a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and consequently NOT a good dude. In fact, he’s the antithesis of a mensch.
The prominent hate-monger’s son Eric Natter (Jeremy Lelliott) shares his father’s commitment to hatred and racism. When he’s taken in for questioning he begins praising the racial theories and policies of Adolf Hitler.
That shit wasn’t cute when Kanye did it and it isn’t cute when the ignorant little white boy does it either. Incidentally, when I was a boy, my father told me that Adolf Hitler would celebrate the birth of a child in Germany by enthusing, “Hotzy totzy, it’s a newborn Nazi.” In a possibly related development, I grew up not being able to trust adults.
The moment that I saw Vance respond to the li’l Hitler making the Nazi salute and blathering nonsense about the greatness and superiority of the white race I had an unmistakable hunch that this would be one of those movies that strikes an important blow against racism and bigotry by featuring at least one scene where a black man hugs a Nazi.
I was right! Ambushed doesn’t just feature A scene where our country’s seemingly unbridgeable racial divide is closed, completely and permanently, by the heartwarming, inspirational image of a pint-sized racist hugging an African-American. It features multiple scenes of African-American-on-racist-child hugging.
But before those healing, cathartic, not at all disingenuous hugs can take place Jerry and his natural enemy, a white child who loves Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, first need to form an unlikely friendship through adversity and danger.
While Eric is being driven to a safe house he’s the target of a second ambush. Three white police officers are killed in the shooting but Jerry and Eric survive and develop a Defiant Ones-like dynamic as they struggle to stay alive and find out who is responsible for the repeated attempts on the child’s life.
Jerry, who is the subject of racism on a micro and macro scale every day of his life, finds himself framed for the murders of his caucasian contemporaries. A cop who is already held in suspicion because of his race and past must elude law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s a plot that wouldn’t feel out of place at the height of the Blaxploitation era but Dickerson eschews the lurid sensationalism of the once controversial, now much-loved sub-genre in favor of straightforward, meat and potato minimalism.
Out of pragmatism, duty and basic human decency, Jerry saves the life of a misguided youth who comes to understand through firsthand experience just how wrong and misguided his conditioning has been.
Dickerson filled the cast with tough guy character actors, including William Forsythe, Bill Nunn, David Keith and Robert Patrick as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan with blood on his hands and an ever increasing body count.
Ambushed succeeds largely on the basis of Vance’s extraordinary lead performance. The screenplay hits some bum notes but Vance carries the film on his broad shoulders. It’s a nuanced, engaging and multi-dimensional turn that anchors a movie that needs the effortless conviction Vance brings to the role.
I don’t want to oversell Ambushed but it an engaging little movie from professionals both in front of the camera and behind it who know exactly what they’re doing.
Buy a signed copy of The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition, the brand spanking new version of a book that compiles all of the best pieces from this wonderful website over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included!
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace