There'd be a cold wind blowing over hell the day that Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson was made patron saint of street life and ghettos. While the prospect of turning to St. "Fiddy" for spiritual guidance remains far off in the horizon, Hollywood offers its own canonization with Get Rich or Die Tryin'.
Though lesser men have done more with worse, by surviving nine bullets point blank 50 Cent has taken what would have been a curious byline in the metro section of a New York newspaper and made it into an identity, an industry and urban folklore. Get Rich or Die Tryin', in its variation on Lazarus, tells a story of a man trying to transcend his origins and circumstance.
Whether or not it succeeds is a test of faith. How much of a believer are you to surrender your sensibilities and see this as a story of true-life redemption and escape? Though coming into the film an atheist, I must confess I was left feeling agnostic.
Maybe my conversion was incomplete because urban dramas have become as stylized and contrived as Broadway musicals, mandated to have sequences of violence and gangster mannerisms. But director Jim Sheridan, who's as black as 50 Cent is Irish, does more with the material than I believed was possible.
The film documents the rise and transformation of a gangster/rapper named Marcus (50 Cent). Marcus grows up with a loving mother, who is a drug dealer, and no knowledge of his father. When his mother is killed, he lives with his grandparents before he turns to drug dealing himself. It's only while in prison that he begins to consider alternative career choices. However, escaping the past is a trying ordeal, at least in gangster films, and Marcus winds up with nine perforations for his past mistakes.
While much of the movie feels like an extended advertisement for 50 Cent's albums, the movie works well when it's about how Marcus understands family and how family ultimately shapes his character and destiny. Marcus' life is a search for place, identity and, finally, independence.
Not knowing his father is a formative element of Marcus' life, and the scenes that deal with how Marcus shores up the ruins of his adolescence make up the film's most compelling moments. In the end, he finally discovers a sense of peace with his girlfriend, Charlene, and the child they have together.
Ann Coulter once made the observation that men need women because they bring calm and remind men of their often neglected humanity. It's interesting that the more important people in Marcus' life are women; for a film about something as heavily criticized for its misogyny as rap, Get Rich or Die Tryin''s outlook toward gender is surprising.
Altogether, the work is a competent vehicle, held together by strong visuals and ensemble acting. While there are too many to be properly addressed in this space, Terence Howard stands out as Bama, a man who reveres Marcus because Marcus gave him the respect no one else would.
Invariably, the film becomes narcissistic in its portrayal of Marcus. When the movie ends with Marcus performing on stage with a giant cross in the back, the story went from being likeable to risible.
Though it might as well have been titled, Portrait of a Rap Artist as a Young Thug, Get Rich or Die Tryin' is better than its origins, and in spite of its rampant self-promotion, the film has an unexpected honesty and affecting character, amid its otherwise overwhelming mediocrity.
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