| Alt Name: | Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned |
| Genre: | Drama |
| Director: | Michael Apted |
| Starring: | Laurence Fishburne Bill Cobbs Natalie Cole Laurie Metcalf Bill Nunn Cicely Tyson |
| Theme Music Composer: | Michael Franti |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Executive Producer: | Laurence Fishburne Walter Mosley |
| Producer: | Jeffrey Downer Jonathon Ker Jeanney Kim Anne-Marie Mackay Helen McCusker |
| Location: | Los Angeles |
| Editor: | Rick Shaine |
| Cinematography: | John Bailey |
| Runtime: | 104 minutes |
| Company: | HBO Pictures |
| Network: | HBO |
Always Outnumbered (also known as Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned) is a television film based on the novel Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by author Walter Mosley. It first aired on pay television channel HBO in 1998.
The film stars Laurence Fishburne as aging ex-con Socrates Fortlow, who after a long incarceration, is trying hard to make a new life and to accept the regrets of his past. He lives in a crime-ridden Los Angeles neighborhood and collects bottles and cans to survive. He meets a young boy named Darryl, who witnessed another child being murdered by a friend of his. He has an immediate connection with Darryl but doesn't treat him with kid gloves.
As he navigates his new existence and tries to make amends for his past mistakes, Socrates also forms and maintains relationships with a variety of different characters, including other ex-cons, local business owners and others from the rough neighborhood.
He helps Darryl throughout the story and also has to deal with being discriminated against by the management at a local supermarket while looking for steady work, seeing a good woman be treated unfairly and his best friend's deteriorating health. All while observing the consequences of his previous actions. As a result, he often finds himself struggling to not explode in a rage and lash out at the world.
The film portrays themes of redemption, forgiveness, and the difficult realities of inner-city life.
The majority of reviews were positive for this film and most praised Lawrence Fishbrune's stellar performance. Upon its release in 1998, Matthew Gilbert at The Boston Globe said "HBO came through with Always Outnumbered, which featured a coolly graceful performance by Laurence Fishburne as a heroic ex-convict."[1]
Renowned writer John Leonard delivered this full-length review for New York Magazine that summarizes the action and analyzes the characters and symbols contained within the movie:
"When we first meet Socrates Fortlow, he’s pushing a shopping cart through South Central Los Angeles, which looks something like Beirut after the latest holy war, collecting bottles and cans to redeem at the local supermarket, where he’d really rather box groceries. Socrates is an ex-con who did hard time for murder and rape. Violence is the very air he breathes, and he’s choking. At the local diner, he won’t ask Natalie Cole out on a date because he doesn’t have a job. He is too unsavory to be welcome at Cicely Tyson’s boarding house, where his best friend, Bill Cobbs, is dying of cancer. “Hungry, horny, and how come? – they all my friends, my best friends,” Socrates tells a little boy who witnessed a murder and is hiding out with him. Meanwhile, he is gluing new legs on an old table to help repair a broken marriage. Socrates is a fixer.
He is also a nineties incarnation of Easy Rawlins, the fifties fixer who solves cases, saves children, and buys buildings in Walter Mosley’s series of mysteries about Watts. In the collection of related short stories that Mosley himself has adapted for this cable-television movie, Socrates will likewise save a child, and that marriage, and maybe even a broken neighborhood, besides easing the exit of Cobbs with morphine and fixing himself like a table. Between flashbacks to his days of rage, Socrates will become a hero.
Fishburne stands up well under the weight of all this symbolism. He is abetted in his dialogue with corrupted Platonic ideals by a crafty Cobbs, an exasperated Cole, a super-respectable Tyson, and Bill Nunn and Laurie Metcalf.
South Central, which is what has become of Watts, is seen by director Michael Apted as if it’s what these people are stuck with instead of a guided tour through an alien hell. If Always Outnumbered veers sometimes alarmingly between Porgy (meets) Touched by an Angel and Superfly meets The Equalizer, Fishburne is always there to fix that, too. And so what we are watching is community."[2]
In a 2021 RogerEbert.com tribute article to director Michael Apted, Matt Zoller Seitz writes "The HBO film Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, adapted by Walter Moseley from his collection of intertwined short stories, had a hardboiled crime-novel wrapping, but inside was an observant and often tender portrait of working Black America, with vivid and eccentric characters rarely seen on TV or in movies."[3]