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Protests by black community activists over the 50 Cent-starrer Get Rich or Die Tryin' continued to spread Tuesday on the eve of the film's debut today (Wednesday). In Durham, NC, LaFonda Jones-General, head of a group called The Freedom Project, told the Charlotte News & Observer that she had sent letters to local movie theaters asking them not to show the movie. She charged that the film will leave young people with the impression that becoming a drug dealer can lead to a music contract. Several critics, reviewing the film today, have taken note of the protests. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times observes, for example, that those leading the demonstrations are "not do-gooders or killjoys but people who have seen the bodies on the streets and attended the funerals and seen drugs taking a deadly tax of young manhood." The film itself is receiving mixed reviews. Ebert praises it as "a film with a rich and convincing texture, a drama with power and anger." However, Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe -- one of the few major-market African-American critics -- argues that the film fails largely because of a flat performance by its star. Not only does it lack emotional punch, he writes, but even the rap singer's narration comes across as "a babyish mumble only Mike Tyson could understand. In his music, that indistinct mutter is a clever instrument: ... But Dr. Dre didn't produce this movie." Likewise, Lou Lumenick writes in the New York Post that "the charismatic rapper is so utterly inexpressive as an actor that he's constantly getting swallowed up in his own movie." Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail suggests that not even the work of award-winning helmer Jim Sheridan could save this film. "Get Rich or Die Tryin' dies tryin'," he comments. "Hard-working to a fault, this is a movie that's all effort and no direction, a movie completely lacking in what its hero eventually finds -- a sense of identity." But A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times that the movie is not really about acting or directing or plot and really amounts to "a triumph of packaging, a carefully engineered product aimed at satisfying the sometimes contradictory needs and concerns of the mass audience." |
