ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS [ 1/2]
Tepid Ice Cube vehicle. Running time: 99 minutes. Rated R (gory violence, profanity, sex). At the Empire, Broadway and 84th Street, the Harlem USA, others.
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THE title of “All About the Benjamins” refers to the guy on the face of the $100 bill.
The movie is basically a tiresome exercise in trying to wring quite a few out of moviegoers wanting to see Ice Cube and Mike Epps between installments of their popular “Friday” series.
Mr. Cube, the short, chunky rapper with the dreadlocks and the perpetual scowl, does not exactly break new ground as Bocum, a Miami bounty hunter with an attitude and ambitions of opening his own shop.
Epps is Reggie, a skinny, dumb, cowardly small-time grifter whose idea of a big score is enlisting a couple of senior citizens in a shoplifting scam.
“He goes to jail more often than Robert Downey Jr.,” grumbles Bocum, when he is assigned to apprehend Reggie once again.
The best part of the movie is by far the opening sequence, in which Bocum stalks trailer trash with a Confederate flag and a racist Warner Bros. cartoon playing on the television (the wonders of synergy – New Line, which made this blaxpolitation filler, is Warner’s corporate sibling).
But the action quickly sinks into by-the-numbers territory, with Bocum and Reggie trading insults as they reluctantly team up – dodging bullets and trying to track down $60 million in stolen diamonds.
Our heroes are also searching for a winning Lotto ticket worth $20 million that Reggie has accidentally left in the possession of the diamond thieves.
Director Kevin Bray, whose clichéd style betrays his music-video roots, devotes far too much time to the mechanics of the illogical plot attributed to Ice Cube and Ronald Lang – and not enough to the mildly amusing banter of Mr. Cube and Epps, who seem to be all too aware they are marking time as they improvise quips.
Tommy Flanagan, the scar-faced Scottish actor, makes a suitably sadistic chief villain, even if his character, a yacht salesman, makes no sense whatsoever.
Nor does just about anything in this interminable movie’s endless final 20 minutes – including an attack by a handy rocket launcher and a patently phony-looking hand-to-hand speeding battle aboard a yacht.