Clockers

Gritty thriller about a white cop’s involvement with a group of black drug dealers. Assigned to investigate the dangerous world of ‘clockers’ – young men who sell small quantities of drugs from recognised street corners – the cop gets to know one of the youths personally. When the neighbourhood drug baron asks the boy to commit a murder, a chain of events is unleashed which spells disaster for everyone involved., The grim realities of drug dealers’ lives provides the basis for this gritty drama. The story centers on Strike, a 19-year old drug dealer who lives in the Brooklyn projects. When Strike agrees to help a local drug lord kill one of rivals, he finds himself in serious trouble., A young man dreams of a better life than his position at the bottom of a drug ring’s food chain. When another dealer turns up dead after the gang leader orders the young man to kill him, the young man in suspected, however a detective things there is more going on., A small-time pusher drags his clean-living brother into his world of cops and crime. Strike commits murder to impress his dealer boss, convincing his sibling to take the rap. But cop Rocco Klein smells a rat. New York drama., At one level, Spike Lee’s film is about drug dealing in the Brooklyn projects, where the ‘clockers’ are at the bottom of the pile, street selling at all hours. At another level it follows Harvey Keitel as the world-weary cop who stubbornly refuses to believe that Mekhi Phifer is the killer of a restaurant owner who banned drug dealing. However, the film’s overall impact is that of a society were survival means climbing out by any means possible and where the law is there to contain lawlessness rather than maintain law-and-order.