Indeed this WAS bad. I felt it was two films. The inside film was a poorly scripted, poorly directed, very poorly shot crime-doesn't-pay film that ran about 67 minutes after whatever was mercifully cut out. Many scenes in the first half seemed to be shot in some "zoom" mode which was distracting and irritating. The characters were too much in your face. You wanted the camera to back up about four to six feet.
Then someone added some post production footage with Morgan Freeman that appeared to turn the film into a whiney pseudo-documentary about gang violence. The resulting combination was the second film.
The documentary talked about murder -- every 34 minutes. The death rate among young American males -- the highest in the world. (Baloney: try living in Liberia or The Congo or Rwanda.) And the prevalence of gangs, especially in Washington, D.C.
The shameful part was that THE PROTAGONISTS IN THIS FILM WEREN'T GANG MEMBERS. They were just drug dealers. So apparently the film-doctors that were sent to rescue this film did all their work by phone and email AND NEVER EVEN SAW THE INNER CORE FILM.
How bad is that?
Using the NetFlix 5 star scale, I have this film a "2", and then down-graded it to a "1" because of the confusion of format and film identity. This translated into about a "3" on the IMDb 10 point scale.
Why a "3"? Because there are worse films than this. The audience is introduced to two or three interesting young African-American actors. They were new to me, but maybe others would recognize them. Some of the slightly older ones could be rappers: I don't know. But seeing new faces was a treat. And the girlfriend wasn't too bad, although her lines were confining.
So a low "3". But as the other reviewer advised, so do I: STAY AWAY!
Then someone added some post production footage with Morgan Freeman that appeared to turn the film into a whiney pseudo-documentary about gang violence. The resulting combination was the second film.
The documentary talked about murder -- every 34 minutes. The death rate among young American males -- the highest in the world. (Baloney: try living in Liberia or The Congo or Rwanda.) And the prevalence of gangs, especially in Washington, D.C.
The shameful part was that THE PROTAGONISTS IN THIS FILM WEREN'T GANG MEMBERS. They were just drug dealers. So apparently the film-doctors that were sent to rescue this film did all their work by phone and email AND NEVER EVEN SAW THE INNER CORE FILM.
How bad is that?
Using the NetFlix 5 star scale, I have this film a "2", and then down-graded it to a "1" because of the confusion of format and film identity. This translated into about a "3" on the IMDb 10 point scale.
Why a "3"? Because there are worse films than this. The audience is introduced to two or three interesting young African-American actors. They were new to me, but maybe others would recognize them. Some of the slightly older ones could be rappers: I don't know. But seeing new faces was a treat. And the girlfriend wasn't too bad, although her lines were confining.
So a low "3". But as the other reviewer advised, so do I: STAY AWAY!