I think the film still works remarkably well and the part that sticks with me is the segment you didn't mention where two feds played by those brilliant character actors Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman bust a supplier played by Miguel Ferrer to testify against a higher ranking one played by Steven Bauer. (Interestingly more than a decade later Breaking Bad cast Bauer to play the head of the Mexican cartel perhaps for this reason.) Ferrer repeatedly points out to Cheadle over the course of being in custody how futile what they are trying to do really is in the grand scheme of things, that whether or not they bring Bauer's character down, the drugs are going to keep coming into the country. He says this after Guzman's character is killed in a car bomb and just prior to being killed himself. And at the end of the film Cheadle shows up seemingly drunk at the boss house and angry about what has happened - but it's all an excuse to plant a bug in his home. Cheadle's storyline is the best one of the futility of the war on drugs, preceding The Wire more than a year before it debuted on HBO. tHAT's one of the parts that sadly hasn't aged at all eevn now.