I just watched the 1994 movie Fresh on cable. Fascinating movie extremely well plotted and brilliantly acted by the boy playing the lead.
Some strange and horrific things happen throughout the movie, but the end, everything falls neatly into place when Fresh takes brilliant revenge on the principal drug gangs in his neighbourhood and simultaneously gets him a ticket out of the projects.
However, there was one bit I didn’t quite get. At one point, Fresh kills his dog. Everything else he did up to this point seemed to fall into place at the end, but I must have missed something – how did killing the dog fit into the plan?
The was ruined by the dog-fight and was now a “winner”. It would be used again and again until it ended up dying a horrible death. I think his friend’s death was an accident, so if he hadn’t have died, he would have kept fighting the dog.
I’m going by memory, so bear with me. I think the dog wasn’t supposed to be fought. The friend entered the dog behind Fresh’s back and the assumption was the dog was going to lose and be killed in the fight. When the dog won, the friend was going to keep fighting the dog, and Fresh knew what that meant. So he killed the dog, rather than have him end up the way most fighting dogs do.
They were being chased by the “bad” guys and the friend dropped something under the car, I don’t remember if it was a gun or not. One of the bullets hit the tire, causing the friends’ hand to be trapped, they couldn’t free it and so Fresh had to leave him and the friend was killed. That wasn’t part of the plan, it was an accident; but the rest of Fresh’s friends felt it was his fault.
The other thing I didn’t catch was how did he know that he and Chuckie were going to be “jumped” at that point? I got that Chuckie’s death wasn’t part of the plan, but in the end that too worked out to Fresh’s strategic advantage.
I thought the gang member placing a gun in the car in full view of Fresh in the back seat, was a little too convenient, also, or maybe I just missed something.
If I recall, Esteban stowed the guns in a storage space behind the driver’s seat. After the hit on the grocery, Fresh was the only one riding back there, so he was able to retrieve one of them. That did seem a bit too fortunate, but there were other places that were similarly fortunate, such as Fresh’s opportunity to plant the gun and the drugs in the bedroom while Esteban was answering the door. He couldn’t have known for sure that he would have gotten that opportunity.
Wow, great movie. I just didn’t realize how old that movie is.
I think it had to do with the larger plot in that he really ended up souring on his friend, which made it easier when he decided to use him as a ‘pawn’.
Love the talk that Samuel L Jackson has with him about playing chess like it was checkers. Didn’t realized I was doing the same thing, and helped my game immensely.
I think the friend was more like a knight, since I seem to recall an earlier conversation between Fresh and his dad about how much Fresh liked the knight and its crooked moves.
Remember the chess lesson Samuel L. Jackson kept trying to teach Fresh: “Never fall in love with your pieces- the chess pieces are nothing but tools to an end. And to get the victory you want, you have to be willing to sacrifice any of them.”
Fresh was taking that chess lesson and applying it to life itself. He started viewing people and using them like pieces in chess. He does it brilliantly, manipulating and using everyone, even getting his only friend killed in the process. It didn’t matter! He’d learned Jackson’s lesson all too well, and treated people as expendable objects, like chess pieces.
Now, it’s not natural to be that steely cold and hard, especially for a little boy. Fresh had to MAKE himself cold-hearted and cold-blooded. Killing the dog was a way of testing himself. He loved that dog, so if he could force himself to kill that dog, well, then he was ready to implement his plan. If he could even bring himself to kill that dog, then he’d have no problem killing anybody else who got in his way.
Fresh might also be a dog in another sense. Taking what holmes said about the dog being a “winner” whose only fate was to be used until he died a horrible death – Fresh himself was in that position. He was the favourite runner of all the local drug dealers; he was a winner. But he saw that his real fate was to just keep playing and winning until someone served him with a horrible death. His scheme served as his attempt to escape the fate of a winner.