Mo Money, No Problems

Spectator's suspended production gives me a rare chance to cheat: I can review All About The Benjamins, the new "action-comedy" starring Ice Cube and Mike Epps, after having read the competition. The Washington Post's Desson Howe says that the movie contains "not a scintilla of originality." Much like his paper's movie reviews can boast smirking turns of phrase in lieu of accuracy, the middlebrow critics' verdicts can usually be predicted from the genre and casting of the picture, and the Post is only unusual for an ongoing policy of introducing factual errors to substantiate their judgments. Benjamins, in fact, provides an innovation early on: Small-time con Reggie Wright (Mike Epps), who's violated parole, runs from no-nonsense bounty hunter Bucum Jackson (Ice Cube; pronounced "Book ëem" because that's what he does) and leaps on a Razor motor scooter: The first time a Razor motor scooter has figured in a movie chase. Someone is going to write the history of the movie chase soon, and what began with cars and trains (D. W. Griffith) and progressed through fast cars (say, Steve McQueen in Bullitt), parachutes (Roger Moore and Richard Kiel in Moonraker), and speedboats and helicopters (Hong Kong flicks) will culminate with the Razor motor scooter (Mike Epps.) It's quite a scintilla to Mike Epps' name.

All About The Benjamins, in fact, often moves beyond originality to be outright didactic. The movie opens with Ice Cube in the Florida Everglades going after a trailer park crook busy watching Little Black Sambo Bugs Bunny cartoons. Soon the baddie's girlfriend and his white trash neighbors are shooting at Ice Cube, who gets thrown through the Stars and Bars hanging in a plate glass window. Yet good prevails, and Ice Cube tazers the malefactor in the crotch for an extended time, bellowing, "You're going to [expletive] jail!"

And this movie gets reviewed as another bag of hip-hop clichÈs. To be sure, director Kevin Bray plunders shamelessly from his peers and predecessors, everything from the (digitally) undercranked pre-credits action discussed above (reminiscent of the opening of Thunderball) to blowing up a big truck of fish with a rocket launcher, a sly wink at P. T. Anderson's Magnolia. Wholesale plagiarism is nowhere so accepted in the arts today as at the movies, a common practice among music video directors and critical darling Wes Anderson. With black people and guns, it's Benjamins; with famous white actors playing wealthy people with amusing character tics, it's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Wealthy white folks--there's the rub. The plot of Benjamins is a slender thing; Bucum and Reggie get mixed up with a winning lottery ticket and $20 million in stolen diamonds. What is startling is just what "action-comedy" (the coinage is due to New Line Pictures) means. When a handsomely dressed villain tries to bump off Epps, Ice Cube comes to the rescue then makes him talk by tightening the bone screws in his forearm--and Ice Cube and Epps talk into the screwdriver like a TV news mic and play the scene for laughs. It could be contended that this only attests to the desensitizing of American culture to violence. There is, however, little misunderstanding a later scene in which Ice Cube and Epps find a Miami plutocrat dead in her bubble bath, offed by the henchmen of Scottish gangster Robert Williamson (Tommy Flanagan, who has the German fraternity brother fencing scars of Nietzsche and Max Weber). Our heroes shun violence, of course, but on discovering one rich Caucasian killed by other rich Caucasians, they clean out the safe, share some laughs, and circumspectly brush the house of prints.

There can be few more concise statements of the distended and corrosive division of wealth in America today. On the one hand are Ice Cube and Mike Epps, men with dreams (a dialectic between Bucum, who wants to start his own PI business, and Reggie, who wants to win the lottery), tough backgrounds, and people they care about. On the other are the rich and filthy, committed to lives of ill-won gains, sensual enjoyment, and vulgar personal adornment, a breed familiar to anyone who has kept up with Ken and Linda Lay. Ice Cube, who scripted the movie with co-writer Ronald Lang, portrays a world riven by wealth where money has rotted away the foundations of morality. Benjamins suggests that unfettered, rampant capital dehumanizes the rich and enthralls the poor so that a violent death is just giggles.

But enough politics. It should be said that the action has a good rhythm, Charlie's granddaughter Carmen Chaplin, as the gangster's moll, is sexy indeed, and the film promises prospective viewers both a unique and satisfying morality play car chase (between Ice Cube's noble Nubian-black Chevy Impala SS and the evil Eurotrash's silver Mercedes) and to date the cinema's finest climactic confrontation at a dog track. All About The Benjamins makes for a couple G's worth of entertainment and social comment.