“Smoove wuz drillin’ her ass like he was workin’ for OPEC”

     There is something that really bugs me about a movie that tries to incorporate topical, smart dialogue into the story without having a story that is either topical or smart.  I suppose the plot of Dough Boys could be considered “topical” in the sense that it is the kind of movie that has always existed, and will always exist, because it depicts characters that are drawn from real life.  In this case, a group of small-time hustlers on the mean streets who bite off more than they can chew when they cross a local gangster boss.  I have seen this story a thousand times, and it rarely resonates any more.  Dough Boys is no exception.

     Two of the four central characters are decent actors.  Cory Hardrict is solid as “Smooth” (although no one ever calls him that.  His name is clearly “Smoove”.)  Smooth is the gangsta-talking tough guy of the group with the standard self-esteem issues and gangster complex that we see so often in these movies.  (Think, a watered-down version of Ice Cube’s character, actually named Doughboy, in Boyz N The Hood.)  And Arlen Escarpeta is pretty good and convincing as the main character and narrator, Corey.  He is the “good guy” in the group - the one who is faithful to his steady girlfriend, who has plans to go to college and escape the ghetto, and so forth.  Of course he is still a petty thug and a criminal.  But he’s the nice one.

      Corey and Smooth have two buddies, Long Cuz (the fat one) and Black (the skinny sketchy one).  Long Cuz is kind of a pointless character, but he gets killed early on so it doesn’t matter.  In fact, the killing of Long Cuz is a very well set up and very shocking moment that is without a doubt the best single moment in an otherwise tedious movie.  Black ends up being a very important character, but he is so poorly written that nothing he ends up doing to become that important character makes any sense.  There was one other guy I thought was a pretty good actor - Wood Harris as the bad guy gangster Julian France.  He was suitably charming and ice-cold and deadly at first.  But during one big final shootout (because these movies must end with one of those), he fires his guns in such an alarmingly sissy way that any tough guy cred he had built up to that point evaporates.  Also, I was laughing at him.  I mean, he may as well be throwing the bullets at the cops.

     One more actor ought to be mentioned.  The local neighbourhood tough guy, Deuce, is played by an actor billed as Kirk Jones.  Kirk Jones is actually Sticky Fingaz from the rap group Onyx.  Remember Onyx?  Slam!  Duh duh duh…anyway.  I know that Kirk Jones and Sticky Fingaz are the same person because I have his solo CD, Blacktrash: The Autobiography of Kirk Jones.  I mention that only because it’s a good CD.  You should pick it up.  It’s certainly better than this movie.  Anyway, Jones (or Fingaz, depending on how he wants to be billed) is that neighbourhood tough guy who proves how tough he is by shooting a seemingly innocent man in cold blood, in a dispassionate sort of way.  I think this may be a clause in the contract of any rapper - they must be made to look like the toughest, baddest, most gangster character in the movie whenever they are acting.

     This applies even to rappers who work with Steven Seagal.  Now, to Sticky’s credit, he does have a moment toward the end of the film where he drops the tough-guy facade and is revealed to be something else entirely.  He even does a pretty solid acting job in that scene.  But like so much of the rest of the movie, it’s all so badly written that it makes no sense, and I just didn’t care about his transformation.  Or, more accurately, I didn’t believe it at all.  I should take the time out here to give kudos to Mos Def, for never ever being the toughest badass in any movie, ever.  And, he’s a good actor.

     So, back to Dough Boys.  Or maybe Doughboys.  The DVD case and imdb and other sources don’t make it clear which is the correct spelling.  But I digress.  The movie is basically what I’ve said.  Small-time hustlers, caricatures of better characters in other movies, get in over their heads and have to pay the local gangster.  There are a lot of really, really long montages of the boys falling in love with the gangster lifestyle, or worrying about their lives, or being sad.  This appears to be time filler in a movie that just doesn’t have enough substance to last an hour and a half.  And there is a sex scene where it looks like for the purposes of filming, the guy and the girl are actually on opposite sides of the blanket.

     There are a lot of really painful sequences of dialogue where characters are supposed to be smart.  Like a scene where two girls in lingerie are talking about colours and a book they’ve read, and Smooth inserts himself into their discussion by talking about the same book and waxing eloquent about the virtues of yellow…I’m not even making this up.  The problem is, the dialogue is written solely in order to make the characters sound smart.  But the actors don’t seem to understand the words they’re using.  Those two girls on the couch might be the worst actresses this side of porn.  That is, assuming they are not actual porn actresses.

     There is a lot of sex in the movie, but basically just lingerie and no boobs.  There is a fair amount of violence, but most of it is ultimately irrelevant, or silly looking.  And the bond between the four petty thieves, which is the central point of the movie, seems to fall apart rather easily when they’re faced with adversity.  And just about every character (Deuce, Julian France, Smooth, Black) ends the movie doing something so out of character that it makes everything they have done up until that point useless.  Only Corey stays consistent from the beginning of the film to the end.  But he’s really cardboard cutout anyway.

     I feel like I’m being too harsh on Doughboys.  Because really, it isn’t that bad.  There are certainly moments that are entertaining, there are exchanges between characters (mostly Corey and Smooth) that are actually compelling.  And there are a couple of shocking murders which are pretty unexpected.  But the movie is so lackadaisical in going through the motions of so many similar films that there is nothing in it to really recommend a rental.  Dough Boys comes out June 16th on DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Arlen Escarpeta, Drama, Gangster, Reagan Gomez-Preston, Sticky Fingaz, Wood Harris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.