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I Miss Eazy-E
All About the Benjamins opens with Ice Cube as a bounty
hunter searching for his prey in a trailer park. The target
is wearing a greasy wife-beater and drinking beer while watching
those old Bugs Bunny black face cartoons on a television that's
rigged up with aluminum foil and coat hangers. Ice Cube busts
in, the light entering the room opaquely through a huge Confederate
flag used as a curtain. They struggle for a bit until the
white trash wife comes in, shot gun blazing, sending Ice Cube
scurrying out of the trailer. He jumps outside through
the Confederate flag. Ice Cube struggles to untangled
himself from the Confederate flag, looks up, and sees that
the whole trailer park has Confederate flags. Then some old
woman who can barely hold her shotgun fires at him, and Ice
Cube runs off, scared out of his wits.
After this opening, this thought actually crossed my mind:
All About the Benjamins could be a great comedy about racism
and the black image portrayed in the media. As
JimmyO points out in his Rush Hour 2 review, guys
like Chris Tucker and Martin Lawrence are barely more than
modern blackface, exploiting a cartoonish black sassiness
with no regard for its own reflexive racism. Unfortunately,
whatever inspired that first five minutes is completely lost
in the rest of All About the Benjamins. I was hoping
for some Friday-quality tales from the hood, but I
got a diamond heist from a director who thinks he's making
Ocean's 11—imagine, if you will, the score from
Ocean's 11 and a film school student attempting Soderbergh's
camera tricks and visual stylings with no real purpose in
mind. I mean really, most of this movie is about a sack full
of diamonds—but it's not All About the Diamonds,
it's All About the Benjamins!!!! Damn!!!!
Mike Epps' kinder, gentler Smokey character never finds a
line as good as "'cause it's Friday; you ain't got no
job... and you ain't got shit to do!" Just like everything
else in our culture, original and edgy performers have been
bought and sold for the masses. Ice Cube wrote this movie,
and in the opening scene, I thought I sensed the Ice Cube
of "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted," but it just disappeared
into this nothing comedy. Whatever happened to the Ice Cube
of the "Death Certificate" LP, his concept album
about his rise and fall in the record industry, which he melded
into an essay on being black in America? Really, whatever
happened to NWA, who celebrated the hedonism of the criminal
life in the face of Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet?
1988's "Straight Outta Compton" album is a landmark,
for better or worse, of rap music because it's harsher and
more belligerent than PE's more conciliatory work. "Fuck
tha Police"? You bet—and get ready for some riots.
But after Ice Cube left, the group descended into self-parody
and irrelevance. He was good in Three Kings, but Ice
Cube has lost the bite that used to make him one of my favorite
artists. His social conscious has become that of NWA's in
the post-Ice "Niggaz 4 Life"—a ploy to sell
himself to suburban white teenagers. Apparently, it is all
about the benjamins. Damn.
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