BELLY (1999)

Now, then.  This movie held two real surprises for me, one of which was how bad it was.  The other surprise is how, after a gang of toughs rob a nightclub, they come back to somebody's crib and turn on the TV and come in on the middle of Harmony Korine's Gummo.  It's a great moment, as tough-eyed gangstas stare disbelievingly as two kids in cowboy hats swear and pretend to kill a young kid with bunny ears.  The scene seems more a statement of comradeship than of dismissal, as if the director is promising to do the same thing for gangsta youth that Gummo did for poor white trash.  He doesn't even come close.

Belly is the debut movie of director Hype Williams who, pound for pound, is one of the best filmmakers to ever work in music videos, and his vision and eye for color basically gave MTV little choice but to show his videos, whether they wanted to or not.  Unfortunately, Belly is not just Hype's debut movie, it's his attempt to make the movie to end all movies.  Belly tries to be a gangsta movie, a slice of ghetto youth movie, a relationship movie, a political movie, and a rap-performer-turned-actor showcase; kind of Gummo, Goodfellas, Scarface, Z, and Rock Around the Clock all pushed together.  But, really, DMX's "Slippin'" does in three minutes what Belly fails to do in 95.

Nas plays Sincere, struggling street youth who is best friends with wild gangsta Tommy Brown (played by DMX), and is also the narrator of the movie.  Not only does Williams use Nas's narration to tell everything he should be showing, but Nas has an inhumanly annoying voice, one of those soft, mush-mouthed voices that sounds like it hasn't quite gone through puberty yet.  His narration starts in rhymed couplets, like rap without the music, which would have been a pretty daring way to go.  But after the first couple of rhymes, the narration settles into a monochromatic drone of gibberish like, "Tommy was wild, dawg.  He was a mad mothafucka, crazy as fuck, and always looking for the big break, for the way outta the ghetto and into some props."  Arghhh.

So the movie opens with Tommy, Sincere and the crew ripping off the nightclub (wearing special contacts that, under the club's black lights, makes them look like demons, a visually stunning conceit).  Pretty soon, though, Tommy is looking at getting a shot dealing the hot new drug, so he makes a deal to cap someone in Jamaica as a favor to the drug distributor.  Meanwhile, Sincere keeps promising his pretty wife Tionne that he's going to quit the gangsta life and they'll be able to go to Africa (lots of narration about how Tionne keeps Sincere real, but the guy's already a murdering tough.  The whole dubious morality is kind of hard to wrap one's mind around.)  Tommy ends up making enemies of the other gangstas on the street, the Jamaicans he wronged, his two girlfriends, and manages to bring himself to the attention of the feds.  Sincere, his buddy, is the only one he can trust to help him out.

Most of the movie is people hanging out, talking shit, pulling guns, swapping exposition, getting blow jobs in pricey vehicles.  There's a lot of pretty images (Williams' shots of Jamaica convey the heat, the poverty, the fear), but, between the narration and the befuddling number of scenes shot in long shot (perhaps thrilled to escape the music video format of tight close-ups), you just have no connection to the characters.  There's one compelling scene; Tommy goes off on a sullen wannabe and, shooting his gun into the floor and yelling, makes the man strip out of his clothes and beg for his life. DMX, with his rasp dog bark of a voice and his ferocious physicality, is utterly terrifying and convincing.  He has the real deal, genuine charisma, and if Belly had actually been any good, could have been the next big thing.  But the scene is forgotten in minutes, lost in the miasma of underdeveloped scenes, overdeveloped plot and blowsy narration.

You would think Belly would be classic melodramatic tragedy; guy trying to get out of crime can't forego his loyalty to his fuck-up friend and ends up with everything coming down around his ears.  But the movie spends so long getting to that point, it's almost over by the time that comes around.  Plus, since Belly is about redemption, the expected tragedy doesn't happen.  Tommy, to save his ass, goes undercover for the feds to get near "The Preacher," a charismatic African American religious figure who the feds want assassinated, and ends up finding God in the process.  Caught between his desire to bump off The Preacher and save his ass and saving his newly found soul, Tommy ends up choosing the light (on New Year's Eve of the millennium, no less), while Sincere and Tionne end up going to in Africa, which is an interesting ending since, metaphorically, it suggests that young gangsta youth have more than one way to save their soul.  But since you don't really have much feeling for the characters, it doesn't mean much.  At the end, The Preacher gets a speech about the black youth of America, lost in a morass of drugs, violence and sex, while earlier parts of the movie flash by on the screen.  This sort of thing only works if you end up sympathizing with the characters, though, which Williams seems to automatically think the audience will.  And perhaps young African American men are so desperate to see themselves on the screen at all that they will have already sided up with Tommy and Sincere.  For me, though, I found myself longing for Deep Cover, the 1992 Bill Duke movie that did most of this much better and had Lawrence freakin' Fishburne doing the narration (and not overdoing it), not wuss king Nas.  Now there's a movie.  Anyway, hopefully, they'll let Hype make another movie and hopefully, Belly will have taught him what not to do.
 

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All written material on these pages is © 1999 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.