"When Quentin Tarantino's " Pulp Fiction " exploded onto the world's movie screens in 1994, it became immediately and ubiquitously influential, inspiring dozens of similarly pitched cocktails of black comedy and violent crime: "2 Days in the Valley," "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," and "Love and a .45" are just a few obvious examples. None of these movies, even the good ones, came close to equaling the entertainment value or literary qualities of Tarantino's masterpiece, but their proliferation had a weird side effect: keeping critics and audiences"
"By the fall of 1997, when writer/director Jim Kouf's " Gang Related " came out, it was not only difficult to distinguish the film from the myriad other crime movies flooding the marketplace, it was difficult to distinguish it from other Tupac Shakur vehicles - the rapper was so prolific that "Gang Related" was his third posthumously released movie to come out in the year following his murder."
Pulp Fiction exploded in 1994 and immediately reshaped mainstream crime filmmaking, inspiring numerous black-comedy, violent-crime imitations. Most imitators failed to match Tarantino's entertainment value or literary qualities, but their sheer number created a Gresham's Law effect that made many distinct films indistinguishable. By 1997 Jim Kouf's Gang Related suffered from genre oversaturation and from association with Tupac Shakur's prolific posthumous film releases. Gang Related also intersected with 1990s "hood" movies and inverted the buddy-cop dynamic, marking a late entry in several fading subgenres and complicating critical and audience recognition of its merits.
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