Get Rich or Die Tryin’
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Rated: R
Website: http://www.getrichordietryinmovie.com/
Release Date: 2005-11-11
Cast: Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Joy Bryant, Benz Antoinee, Viola Davis, Terrence Dashon Howard
Director: Jim Sheridan
Screenwriter: Terence Winter
Music Score: 50 Cent
WorkNameSort: Get Rich or Die Tryin’
Our Rating: 2.50
Determined to star in his own 8 Mile, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson comes up a day late and a dollar short. The usual hip-hop hypocrisies infest this semi-autobiographical tale of a dope dealer’s rise to rapping glory, which laments the sad brutality of life on the streets while glamorizing every minute of it. Director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In America), playing Curtis Hanson to his star’s Marshall Mathers, works hard to make us accept the decades-spanning revenge fantasy as a serious and provocative artistic statement, but the crowd-pleasing scenes of cold-blooded murder and montages of BET-ready boot-knockin’ say otherwise. It doesn’t help that Sheridan is stuck with a semicompetent leading man who can’t pull off the haunted intensity the leading role requires. The only emotion that Mr. Cent looks entirely comfortable replicating, in fact, is good-natured bonhomie hardly the prescription for a long and happy life as a marquee gangsta.
This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2005.