I hate watching films that are kind of autobiographical, but not. Gangster Rapper, Curtis “”50 (pronounced Fiddy) Cent”” Jackson has followed the path of his mentor, Eminem, and has gone Hollywood in his film debut the semi-autobiographical “”Get Rich or Die Tryin’.””
“”Get Rich or Die Tryin'”” 50 opens with Marcus (played by 50) and his crew robbing an Columbian cash drop. The sequence is fairly pedestrian it’s stark, realistic, but weirdly edited. You see guns going off, but then cutaways, so it’s difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on or if people are actually being shot. At one point Bama (played by “”Hustle and Flow’s”” Terrance Howard) shoots his gun at someone and we have no idea who or if the guy was shot, then he grabs a kid and pulls the trigger, again we don’t know if the kid was shot. At this point Marcus fires his gun, it looks as though he shot Bama, but not. It’s just weird. Later Marcus is shot 8 times and is about to take a bullet to the head when the film flashes back to his younger years with his beloved, drug dealer mother. His life is sort of ideal, his beautiful mother dotes on him, he has more than most people in his neighborhood, and he even has a best friend who is a beautiful neighborhood girl. Sure he doesn’t know who his father is, but he deals. All of this in contrast to his Grandmother who is taking care of 8 kids in a small row house. Yes everything is relatively good, until his mother his murdered and her apartment is set on fire. Things go downhill from there.
In order to get out of his grandmother’s house he becomes a crack dealer/runner for the local boss Majestic (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who tries to instill in him the idea of loyalty. Even though Marcus is a crack dealer, his dream is to become a gangster Rapper. Of course things happen, he ends up in Jail and meets his friend and “”manager”” the sometimes psycho, Bama (played by Terrence Howard). The plot of this movie is a standard by the numbers affair. The problem is, while watching the film, I wasn’t able to separate the story from 50 Cent’s real life, we know that (if you believe his bio) he was a former crack head, he was shot 9 times, and shot at several times after he became a rapper. So while watching this film you can’t help but think “”did this really happen?”” Or was it made up, supposedly Get Rich is 75 percent true, but which 75 percent? It bugged me. Another issue with this film is, I’m not a 50 Cent fan, but I felt like I needed to be in order to get full enjoyment out of the film. I was wondering is any of his crew was part of his real life “”G Unit,”” or if the feud that he had with Majestic and Dangerous were real, and if so who were these characters really supposed to represent.50 somehow lacked presence and charisma on screen, he comes across as a likable drug dealer, but his facial expressions rarely changed. His happy, serious, and contemplative faces all look the same. With that said with a better part (kind of ironic, since he was playing himself) he could have a future. Everything about 50, from his image as a gangster, to the video game, and now this movie feels packaged – packaged to make 50 seem hard and tough, when it seems like he’s anything but a hard core thug. [pagebreak]
Director Jim Sheridan has taken this material and watered it down. Ok, watered down is harsh, but the film lacks a sense of urgency, or dire straights. The pacing is painfully slow, it feels overly long and perhaps the most serious mistake is the almost total lack of music. There’s a nice music track at the beginning and the end, after that there’s nothing – other than a little track that young Marcus made for his “”best friend.””What makes “”Hustle and Flow”” work is that you can see DJ’s progression from being a pimp to a rapper, and his desperation to get out by any means necessary. In “”Get Rich or Die Tryin'”” Marcus claims to want to be a rapper, and we get a few shots of him writing his lyrics down, but there’s a lack of desperation, it seems like rapping is a hobby to him, and he’s not trying to make anything happen to change his situation. It’s as if stuff happens to him, and he has no control over his life, and he just sort of smiles and go with the flow.””Get Rich or Die Tryin'”” isn’t a bad movie, it’s just not innovative or engrossing enough to make you want to pay attention to it. If you like 50 Cent, then this is another pre-packaged product that fans will like or love. For the rest of us, we can wait for the DVD. Final Grade CEM Review byMichelle AlexandriaOriginally Posted 11/09/05