"Set It Off" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL November 16, 1996 "Set It Off" is being advertised, misleadingly, as a Black woman action film and compared by some critics to "Thelma and Louise." Oh, there's lots of action in the film--bank robberies, shoot outs, car chases and the fact that these are being done by women is a link to "Thelma and Louise" clearly enough. But the differences between this film and your run-of-the-mill action film and the ways that it's NOT like "Thelma and Louise" are, to me, more central to this film. I went to this film expecting to add another to my list of "comeuppance film," but the screenwriters (or perhaps the reality of the lives of Black women who live in South Central L.A. housing projects) failed to cooperate. The women in the film are ready and willing to give the powers that be a dose of comeuppance; but for all their grit, courage, smarts, and desperation they are, in the end, tragically not able to transcend the grim realities of their lives. The women in question are Frankie (Vivica Fox), Stony (Jada Pinkett), Cleo (Queen Latifa), and Tisean (Kimberly Elise) who are all close friends who grew up together and are still living in a public housing project. Frankie is ambitious and works hard at her job as a bank teller while the other three work for minimum wage for a janitorial service, cleaning corporate offices at night. The film opens with a harrowing scene in which the bank where Frankie works is robbed by some young Black men from the project whom, of course, she knows. When one holds a gun on her and demands money she calls him by name and tries to tell him not to do this instead of doing what bank employees are trained to do in such situations. A terrible bloody shoot out between bank robbers and a guard ensues; while one bank robber gets away with some money, several people are shot and Frankie is fired because she didn't follow proper procedures and because she knew the perpetrators. Unable to get another white collar job, she joins the janitorial crew. Stony, who has been trying to act as a parent to her teenage brother since their parents were killed four years before, is in despair when police shoot him dead, mistakenly thinking he's the bank robber. Tisean, who can't earn enough money on minimum wage to pay for child care for her son, brings him to work and loses him to the child protection authorities after he drinks some cleaning fluid and has to be rushed to the hospital. She won't get him back until she can prove that she can provide safe child care for him. The quartet is rounded out by Cleo, a big, wise-cracking woman with a taste for cars and women. One afternoon, sitting together on a roof looking for comfort in friendship and pot, they remark that if crack-head Darnell can rob a bank and come away with $20,000, they ought to be able to too, so the planning begins. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is when the women sit around a great conference table in one of the offices they clean and plan a heist with each doing right on impersonations of a mafia council meeting from "The Godfather." While casing a bank Stony meets and subsequently starts dating Keith, a gorgeous Harvard-educated banker (handsome hearthrob Blair Underwood). This film's strong point is in the script--not necessarily the plot but the characterizations and the detailed nuances of the lives of women who live on the margins of the economy and are trying to survive and improve their situation against nearly impossible odds. Not a surprise, then, that it was written by Takashi Bufford and Kate Lanier (who also wrote the screenplay for the Tina Turner biopic "What's Love Got to do with It?").That makes this, I think, the first mainstream film in which Black women are the ones giving voice to the lives of working class Black women just as a Black woman writer, Terry McMillan was able to do for Black middle-class women in "Waiting to Exhale." I can only judge by the responses of the largely Black and female audience I saw the film with that the characters these writers have created ring true. And this film doesn't suffer from the regrettable homophobia that plagued "Waiting to Exhale," for Cleo's unabashed lesbianism is front and center here and her friends seem o.k. with it (more so than last night's audience, I must say). So the film has much to recommend it, though I found myself wishing, at the end, that it had been more of a comeuppance film. I guess I'm wishing for fantasy, but sometimes a fantasy that can inspire is more useful than a grim reminder of the way things are. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.