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YMMV / New Jack City

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  • Awesome Music: The soundtrack, which is filled with catchy early '90s New Jack Swing/R&B hits like Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up", Johnny Gill's "I'm Still Waiting" and Christopher Williams's "I'm Dreamin'".
  • Cult Classic: An early-90s crime thriller that many say still holds up.
  • Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Being a drug lord is clearly not an admirable goal to attain, but damn it do Nino and his CMB gang make it look cool with all of the money, power, and respect they possess.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Nino. He's truly a bastard in virtually every sense of the word, but he still has quite a following among female viewers (and male viewers for that matter). Being played by a young Wesley Snipes was doubtless a major factor in this.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Seeing Ice-T's and Michael Michele's characters as allies become this after realizing what the former would do to the latter in the next production they were in together. Additionally, he became a powerful and ruthless drug lord, the same exact person that he was trying to bring down in the film.
    • During his trial, Nino tries to evade responsibility by claiming Kareem Akbar was the true mastermind behind CMB. Years later, after both Wesley Snipes and Christopher Williams had dated Halle Berry and she went on to say that a previously abusive boyfriend had beat her so badly she became deaf in one ear, the latter man pointed the finger at the former as being her unnamed abuser in question after Williams himself was blamed.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "SIT yo' five dollar ass down before I make change!"
    • "I wanna shoot you so bad my dick is hard."
    • Nino crying as he's about to shoot G-Money is a popular reaction gif/picture, where it's primarily used by someone who's forced to denounce somebody they genuinely liked.
    • "Am I my brother's keeper? Yes, I am!"
  • Moral Event Horizon: Nino crossed it either when he used a little girl as a human shield during a hit on his life at a wedding or years earlier when he killed Scotty's mother (a random schoolteacher whom he didn't even know) when he was in a gang initiation.
  • Values Resonance: Nino's "Not So Different" Remark in court, while mostly based on Blatant Lies designed to shift away the blame from his own wrongdoings, does raise some valid discussions about the role the government and society at large play in The War on Drugs, which came increasingly into question by the Turn of the Millennium and The New '10s. The quote has been sampled by many hip hop artists:
    Nino: I'm not guilty. You're the one that's guilty. The lawmakers, the politicians, the Colombian drug lords, all you who lobby against making drugs legal. Just like you did with alcohol during the prohibition. You're the one who's guilty. I mean, come on, let's kick the ballistics here. Ain't no Uzis made in Harlem. Not one of us in here owns a poppy field. This thing is bigger than Nino Brown. This is big business. This is the American way.
  • WTH, Costuming Department?: Nino is considered a rather fashionable guy for the early 90s... except for his haircut, which resembles a speed bump.

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