Fresh

Nelson's is one of the year's best performances in nothing less than one of the year's best films. [23 Sep 1994, p.2]

The acting by Esposito and Jackson is exceptional, but it is on the remarkable face of Nelson that Yakin shows what gets lost when a child beats criminals at their own game.

Step by step, Yakin and the 13-year-old Nelson-who plays his part with a beautifully wary, quiet calm-take you into Fresh's harsh world, accustom you to its murderous routines, ways and lingo, its boredom and sudden violence. Seeing it through Fresh's relatively innocent eyes gives it harrowing edge and clarity. [31 Aug 1994, p.1C]

Fresh sounds like another slice of low-life, a study of an intelligent but fatally disadvantaged ghetto child's inexorable descent into criminality. But if the situations are (at first) familiar, the characters aren't; they may look like the same old junkies and dealers and whores and gangsters, but first-time director Boaz Yakin invests all of them--particularly Fresh (Sean Nelson)--with a subtle, complex life that's both painful and exhilarating.

It takes a bit to get going, but once it does, Fresh never lets up.

The movie's two instincts are at complete odds with each other. The first is to portray with compassion and understanding a young man of great gifts who is twisted by a cruel society into childhood's end. The second is to provide a rousing goose of vigilante justice more appropriate to the Death Wish films. How much better if Yakin had made up his mind; the movie wouldn't feel so split.

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect.