Posted: 11/13/2005

Get Rich or Die Tryin’

(2005)

by Ben Beard

As if in movies there’s ever a choice

Hoping to follow in the footsteps of that Eminem and Curtis Hansen vehicle 8 Mile, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Jim Sheridan team up to paint another mural by the numbers. This time, despite a few moments of promise, the effort results in a mash up of various genres, ultimately signifying nothing beyond a waste of time.

After an impressive opening sequence, the story begins with young Marcus—a well-intentioned black kid stuck in a morass of others’ making—being raised by his drug-dealing single mother. An adult Marcus narrates the film from a future vantage point. Mother and son live with the accoutrements of a nice life, but the dangers of the trade threaten the tenuous peace of their existence. She works for or with (it isn’t clear) a man named Majestic, an ambitious street dealer with a mean streak and a killer sense of style.

The predictable happens: Marcus’s mother is murdered, suspicion falling on a rival dealer who looks like Rick James. Marcus goes to live with his grandparents, immigrants from the Caribbean, and their houseful of cousins. Around this time, Tupac and Dr. Dre hit, and soon every black kid in the city is trying to record a rap tape. Gangster rap explodes. In the solitary hours, Marcus raps along with his favorites. Due to family problems, Marcus eventually winds up in the basement, listening to the rap music of NWA and the like, while harboring thoughts of revenge on his mother’s killer. To keep the hate alive, he keeps a picture of Rick James hanging above his bed. Time passes. Marcus enters high school a full-blown thug.

Enter 50 Cent. He looks great on-screen, a packed mass of coiled springs. He moves well, filling each frame with a strong physical charisma. There seems to be hidden within his enormous smile and dark eyes an intriguing benevolence combined with a ferocious temper (a sort of lazy James Cagney), as well as a rascally playfulness that the film never explores.

Then he opens his mouth and talks.

Acting is the sort of skill most people take for granted. It’s only when the arrogant and the insane begin to ply their luck at the trade that we realize the challenges in acting well. And 50 Cent does not act well. He cannot deliver his lines with anything beyond a metronomic cadence, like a child reading out loud for the first time. He isn’t up to the task of conveying the range of emotions needed. His acting is flat, wooden, boiled free of life. It leaves us clamoring for the fiery zeal of Tupac, or the distilled, insouciant confidence of Snoop. Or even the feral humor of Eminem. As the film progresses, 50 Cent’s acting improves, but the role should have gone to someone else. Perhaps all of the movie’s flaws stem from this unavoidable fact: 50 Cent is no actor.

Marcus begins selling for spending money and then purchases a gun. In the first of many plot twists that don’t go anywhere, Marcus gets busted in high school and goes to jail. He emerges a man, hard, mean, angry, and driven. But driven to what? This is what the film never establishes, alluding to the Hollywood clichés of self-expression, but never developing his desires. What does Marcus want? A family? Fame and fortune? Revenge? It cuts at the heart of the movie and casts Marcus’s every action into doubt.

Marcus links up with a thuggish crew of three other bangers. They work for Majestic, who has risen up through the drug ranks, a sort of third in command beneath the scary and quiet Levar and his garish number two, Odell. The arrival of crystallized cocaine—crack—invigorates the burgeoning black mafia just as it destroys black communities. Driven and disciplined, Marcus soon becomes Majestic’s top earner. Dueling with Colombian dealers on the same block, Marcus and his crew soon find themselves on the cusp of a major drug war.

There’s lots more. The ambitious storyline involves multiple revenge schemes, inexplicable rap battles, elaborate betrayals, musical aspirations, and another stint in prison. 50 Cent’s narration is the only thing that keeps the disparate plot points together. What emerges isn’t quite a period piece or a character study. Nor is it much of a gangster film. It watches like a parody of all three, a low calorie version of each.

Back in prison, Marcus is confined to solitary and here, alone in the dark, he begins his life as a rapper in earnest. He meets Bama (played by Terrence Howard) and the two soon become friends. Howard almost saves the film and it isn’t for lack of trying that he fails. You can see it in his jittery fingers and trembling lips; he wants the film to be better. But the screenplay gets worse and worse as the movie progresses. Howard is restricted to nonsensical utterances that should never have made it past the editing room.

Through all the whirlwind reversals, Bama ends up 50 Cent’s manager and 50 ends up recording songs under the moniker of Little Caesar in New York. Majestic has risen to the top of his profession, now a gang lord at the top of the scrap heap. The film tries to connect to larger themes and congeal into something but it’s too little, too late. In the beginning of the end, Majestic and 50 become enemies, sealing the film’s doom. The third act falls apart into nonsense. There are murders with no consequences, storylines that don’t go anywhere, and a major revelation that means nothing. It’s all fodder for the eventual moment when Marcus will shine, and a filmmaker like Jim Sheridan should have known better.

Sheridan obviously sees parallels between the downtrodden Irish and the African American, or else, why would he deviate from his Irish-centric filmography? Perhaps on paper Sheridan saw something besides dollar signs, but the end product looks like nothing more than a crass money grab. Fine, but can’t audiences expect something in return while their being bilked by yet another gimmick?

For a film following the hard lives of urban African Americans, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ falls into surprising weaknesses. The wimpy musical score—suitable perhaps for mid-90s melodrama—layers the movie with a cheesy, dated sensibility. The rap songs are great; in fact, the movie is best when reveling in the old school rap of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Characters never meet as equals. Each scene seems to revolve around a false dichotomy of bad guys and good guys. The film even botches this simplistic storytelling method, as most of the characters don’t make any sense. Worse, there’s a loose feel to the proceedings at odds with the slick, professional visuals. It’s a convoluted and confused endeavor, an attempt to bridge inner city verities with tried and true formulas of filmmaking.

Lacking the exuberance and sense of danger that characterizes Goodfellas, or the sense of inescapable doom present in Carlito’s Way, or even the raw anger and sense of cyclical street violence that saturates Menace to Society, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ offers no surprises. It’s all hyperbolic language and half-baked ideas. Especially in the wake of City of God, that dazzling musical gem that has abolished any possibility of future mediocrity in the gangster movie, this film tastes stale and old and utterly antiquated.

The fact that something exists is not ample justification for its existence. This applies to languages, governments, movements, movies and music. In other words, just because gangster rap has been an economic absolute of the pop musical charts doesn’t mean we should celebrate its existence. It will take films far better than this one to explain, and perhaps rejoice in, the violent phenomenon.

It all adds up to a slick morality tale without morals. A miserable piece of filmmaking, made all the more repugnant by the talent of those involved. Lacking the guts to glorify the banger lifestyle and lacking the moral clarity to condemn it, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ carries all the gravity of a slick rap song soaring up the pop charts: a few moments of distraction, perhaps a nice beat, but nothing more than a recycled version of something that at one time was powerful, distinct, and original.

Shame on everyone involved.

Ben Beard is a writer and film critic living in the Midwest.

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