

#UNDERCOVER COP RIMS MOVIE#
Janet Jackson, in her breakout lead movie role, plays the film’s quiet storm: Justice, a poet and hair stylist who’s turned cold in the aftermath of seeing her boyfriend (played by Q-Tip) shot to death next to her at a drive-in theater. Tupac is a master of lusty gazes in John Singleton’s tender follow-up to Boyz N the Hood. Watch it on Amazon, Apple TV+, YouTube, and Google Play That might sound like a slight, but it’s not that’s also the energy behind my favorite 50 Cent songs. The scene has no purpose other than to be both mean and funny as hell. 50 brings the kid into the garage, where he and his boys proceed to scare him shitless. One scene in particular becomes something more: 50 Cent and his crew of ex-marine bank robbers are chilling in his garage lifting weights-as ex-marine bank robbers do-when his teenage daughter’s prom date arrives to pick her up. But is he even really acting? All he has to do is be jacked and mumble menacing one-liners, which is what he’s been doing in the real world since the days of 50 Cent is the Future. getting the Keyser Soze treatment-50 Cent still manages to shine. –Alphonse PierreĮven among the outlandish characters and scenarios of Den of Thieves-Gerard Butler as a crooked cop who gets into an altercation at a Benihana, Ice Cube’s son O’Shea Jackson Jr. It’s a shame that Hollywood didn’t give him a shot at some B versions of Wesley Snipes movies. It’s so much cooler than it has any right to be, with Ice-T coming off like a real-deal action star. Once Ice-T realizes their intentions, he has to fend off these rich dudes Die Hard-style.
#UNDERCOVER COP RIMS FREE#
Turns out they just want to set him free in the woods and hunt him down as part of their friendly competition.



Ice-T, in a frightening dread wig, is a suicidal Seattle homeless man who belives that he’s been given a financial lifeline when he’s hired as their tour guide. Dutton, etc.), gather in a remote cabin in the woods to play a violent game. Thank God! A troop of middle-aged rich men, played by a who’s who of character actors (Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, Charles S. Watch it on Amazon, Apple TV+, and RedboxĮrnest Dickerson is a treasure: The director and cinematographer grabbed a script for a modern adaptation of the classic short story The Most Dangerous Game and decided that Ice-T needed to be the star. “Why didn’t you kill me?” he screams as they take him away. 1/16th eventually die in a shootout with the police. All of the characters butcher slang throughout the movie, and all but Mr. 1/16th (MC Serch) lays down punchlines about blue eyes and colonialism. In the performance of a song called “Blak Iz Blak,” their militancy is obviously performative, and made especially ridiculous when a white rapper who calls himself Mr. Their frontman is Big Blak Africa (Mos Def), who is aware that the show is going to make a joke of Black people, but auditions anyway. During the hilarious audition scene, we meet a so-called pro-Black rap group called the Mau Maus, consisting of characters played by Mos Def, Charli Baltimore, Canibus, MC Serch, and others. Spike Lee’s 2000 satire stars Damon Wayans as a television executive who rises in the company by organizing a hit minstrel show. Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Canibus, Charli Baltimore, MC Serch, and more in Bamboozled (2000) And while Singleton’s decision to cast one of the gangsta rappers as his protagonist Doughboy could be seen as a shortcut to establishing the character’s bona fides, the movie fiddles with your expectations for Doughboy by giving him vulnerability and emotional stakes-making him more than just a tough-guy prop.Ģ6. The few films that featured rappers previously tended to use them as musical cameos or easy signifiers of street authenticity. If one role signaled the arrival of the rapper-as-movie-star, it was Ice Cube in John Singleton’s 1991 classic Boyz N the Hood. In the 1996 hood-flick parody Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, Shawn Wayans as Ashtray tells a Black child that they both belong to an “endangered species.” The kid asks, “Why, because we’re Black males?” and Ashtray snaps back, “No, because rappers are taking all the good acting jobs.” That joke was probably from a place of bitterness but it was partially true: By the mid 1990s, plenty of rappers had parlayed the charisma that their music careers demanded into big-screen stardom.
