I can see why this seemed like such a good idea. Jim Sheridan, a director who has made brilliant films about the strife and violence in Northern Ireland and has done so without becoming maudlin, put at the helm of a film that deals with the gangsta culture of violence in contemporary New York. The insights he would bring to the subject, the objectivity of a non-American coupled with a take on violence that transcends the particulars of the time and place. And if in GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’ he’d had a decent script to work with, or a leading man who could rise above it, we’d have something worth seeing here. Alas, he didn’t, he isn’t, and we don’t.
The man in question is Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, a successful rapper taking the acting plunge as Marcus, a drug dealer with dreams of becoming a rapper. I can’t speak to his stage presence when in his natural, rapping element, but as an actor, the word that comes to mind is dull. Mind-numbingly dull. Mannequin dull. As his character’s girlfriend tells him at one point, he has buried his emotions, and of all the cues he could have taken from a script full of shootings, stabbings, and a de-toothing, that’s the one Jackson took to heart. He’s the embodiment of entropy. For contrast there’s the superb Terrence Howard, as Bama, Marcus’ best friend after he saved his life during an attempted shower shiving, a sequence that is one of the few to bear Sheridan’s unmistakable stamp of detailed yet detached observation. Howard brings a smooth electricity that lights up the screen as the jittery second banana whose convoluted logic has the virtue of being mulled over not wisely, but extensively.
The story is a time-honored one. Cute kid, struggling single mom (in this case dealing drugs to buy cute kid sneakers), murder of said mom (an event telegraphed from her first appearance on screen), orphaned kid drifting into the family business, becoming successful thanks to an expansive mentor, doing time, and along the way dreaming of quitting his day job to become a rapper. There’s also the love of a good woman (Joy Bryant) and a baby to help set him on the straight and narrow. The execution, as I mentioned before, leaves much to be desired. It begins with a robbery in which Marcus and his pals fail to wear masks of any kind. They also stop in the middle of the proceedings for Bama and Marcus to have a serious discussion about their feelings. It gets progressively worse, with Marcus’ rapper dreams thwarted by his ex-mentor who has taken it personally that Marcus wants to quit the business and who has, unaccountably, now become a recording mogul. There’s the requisite number of shoot-outs, betrayals, and general posturing about who will win the drug wars on the streets and who Marcus’ daddy really is. Linear narrative is not the way the script has chosen to go, nor is coherence, and Jackson’s voice-overs, like his delivery, are interesting only for the way the monotone never changes, whether vowing revenge for a pal’s shooting, or meeting his drug kingpin idol and telling him that he’s always thought of him as a god.
GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’ is such a hopeless mishmash of muddled timelines and gangsta clichés that even the 50 Cent fans in the audience were laughing at it in all the wrong places, a fact all the more sad for the story being based on Jackson’s life. The fans, though, were repaid for sitting through to the end with Jackson doing what he does best over the closing credits, standing up on a stage and rapping his heart out. All I could think as I left the theater, given the curly-cued timeline the script adopted, is why they didn’t get to it sooner.
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