Benjamins Brat
Ice Cube, looking to collect mad money, comes up
bankrupt.
Before the opening credits of All About the Benjamins have
rolled, we've seen Ice Cube clothesline a girl in a bikini and repeatedly zap a
redneck in the testicles with a Taser even after he's
been subdued. Not half an hour later, Cube's calling his Middle Eastern boss
"rag-top son of a bitch" and pointing a gun at a child. Moments after
that, he's torturing a helpless foe by drilling metal screws into the man's
bloody forearm. Flawed heroes are all well and good, but it's hard to root for
such an utter bastard, especially when his only motivation is to get hold of
diamonds that were never rightfully his to begin with.
Cube,
playing bounty hunter Bucum (pronounced,
appropriately, "book 'em"),
seems to be counting on his star charisma to get the viewers on his side. Think
about it: The man once known for rapping about hurling profanities at police,
threatening Korean grocery store owners and referring to white folks as snakes
and devils assumes he'll be inherently likable. Then again, some of his CDs are
balancing acts; in 1998, he released War and Peace (The War Disc), then
followed it two years later with its Peace Disc sequel -- yin and yang.
No such luck here. Cube can't even seem to muster an alternate facial
expression to his trademark scowl. It's no better a performance than one would
expect from a musician, except that Cube has Three Kings and Boyz N the Hood under his belt, so we know he
can do better. Perhaps he fears that playing anything other than a bully at
this point will compromise his carefully cultivated gangsta
image.
Bucum desperately needs some money because he doesn't
like having to work for a boss who, you know, tells him what to do and stuff.
He's trying to go into business for himself as a private investigator, and
might even have the money if he didn't waste it on $600 tropical fish that tend
to die within a couple of hours. In the meantime, he's stuck with low-paying
assignments, such as pursuing small-time hustler Reggie Wright (Mike Epps, best
known for replacing Chris Tucker in the Friday sequel). Wright's general
M.O. is to rip off convenience stores with the help of two foul-mouthed old
ladies, who say things like "You still talkin' shit, bitch?" as a way of getting cheap laughs.
In an
extremely unlikely coincidence, Wright wins the lottery on the same day he
accidentally stumbles upon a diamond heist, only to then leave the winning
ticket in the jewel thieves' van. Promptly caught by Bucum,
who's upset that the thieves shot at him while he was trying to grab Wright,
the con man persuades his captor to help him get the diamonds and the lottery
ticket by pursuing the bad guys. Or something like
that.
What
follows is a bunch of poorly choreographed chases whose ineptness director
Kevin Bray (a veteran video helmer for the likes of
'N Sync, Ben Folds Five and De La Soul) tries to disguise with every trick in
the book: drop-frame, freeze-frame, insertion of black-and-white stills, slo-mo, repeat action and so on. The film's
fast-paced enough that most probably won't think to look at their watches, but
not quite quick enough to gloss over plot problems. When not extrapolating huge
chunks of exposition from nothing, Cube and Epps are stumped by setups so
obvious you'll be 10 steps ahead of them. If the point is comedic banter,
that's not too effective, either. Though occasionally amusing, Epps' jokes tend
toward the very obvious: wearisome references to Christopher Reeve's paralysis,
Robert Downey Jr.'s back-and-forth to the jailhouse
and copious references to the large amounts of pot that black people smoke.
(Doesn't anyone ever find this stuff offensive?)
The
villain of the piece -- Robert Williamson, played by scar-faced Tommy Flanagan
-- turns out to be a menacing boat salesman. Since his boats apparently
sell for millions of dollars, it isn't clear why he needs the diamonds, but
he's Scottish and says "fuck" every other word, which is apparently
enough to indicate his evilness. Plus, since we've established that Bucum hates people of other ethnicities, Williamson needs
to be even more racist, so we need to learn that he doesn't sell boats to
nonwhites and uses the redundant slur "black nigger." Flanagan fits
the bill physically, but is driven to so overact that you may forget how good
he was in Ratcatcher.
Ultimately, All About
the Benjamins plays like a knockoff of