The Wood (1999)

Review by All Movie Guide
The Wood is a comedy divided into two ill-fitting halves: the good one, which takes place in the nostalgic 1980s and features unknown actors, and the bad one, a modern-day wedding disaster in which three rising stars show lackluster chemistry. The good one, however, is reason enough to recommend the movie. With Sean Nelson, the talented young actor who carried Fresh (1994), setting the pace, the flashback trio display an effortless joshing camaraderie, just one of the details of an Inglewood that seems charmed through the selective lens of memory. Here The Wood smartly tweaks the familiar agendas and archetypes of 'hood movies: The threatening gang-banger is wise and forgiving, and the cops, usually portrayed as racial profilers, are black. Even when the plot details are a little scattershot, the tone sees them through. The present tense, however, is another matter. Not only don't Omar Epps, Taye Diggs, and Richard T. Jones work well together, offering different characterizations and group dynamics, but director/screenwriter Rick Fumiyawa makes a crucial error by shifting the movie's perspective. While the flashback is told through the eyes of Mike (Nelson/Epps), it's Diggs' relatively unfamiliar Roland who's getting married, leading to narrative inconsistency and thematic confusion. Given the weak link between the flashbacks and the present, and Fumiyawa's evident preference for re-creating another era, The Wood would have been smarter to live in the past. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide