Release Date: March 8, 2002
Starring: Ice Cube, Mike Epps, Carmen Chaplin, Roger Ruenveur Smith, Tommy Flanagan, Eva Mendes
Directed by: Kevin Bray
Written by: Ronald Lang, Ice Cube
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence, language, brief sexuality)
Money can make people do funny things. That's the idea behind All About the Benjamins, and for those who are unhip to the term "Benjamins" (referring to hundred-dollar bills), no, it's not about a couple guys named Benjamin. It's a fairly entertaining action-comedy following two flamboyant men as they chase $20 million worth of diamonds and a winning lottery ticket good for another $60 million. Without writer/producer/star Ice Cube, though, director Kevin Bray (who cut his teeth doing music videos) would have simply had a senseless action movie with little continuity or purpose.
A former singer-songwriter, Ice Cube first came to the cinematic scene with a strong performance in the powerful Boyz N the Hood in 1991. Since then, he's gained a fair amount of praise for his work in films like Friday and Three Kings. With Benjamins, Cube further proves his resilience as an actor, and he appears mostly responsible for nearly all that is good about this film.
He plays a Miami-based bounty hunter named Bucum Jackson, and he learns that Reggie Wright (Mike Epps, How High), a low-key con man he's arrested on more than one occasion, has jumped bail again. Wright gets himself caught up in a diamond theft while trying to escape Jackson, loses his wallet which contains a winning lottery ticket, and eventually gets both he and Jackson on the bad side of a dangerous villain (Tommy Flanagan, Gladiator). Jackson and Wright then team up against the villain and his thugs, and soon everyone is going after a stash of diamonds worth millions -- which, as anyone would agree, is some "phat bling-bling."
It's fun watching both Epps and Ice Cube; Epps is sort of a bumbling crook, while Cube's character is a tough, straight-to-the-point man on the right side of the law. The two have a chemistry that generally works, and it seemed to almost work as well as the contrasting characters in films like Rush Hour and Beverly Hills Cop. It's Ice Cube's cool-headedness that makes that chemistry and most of the story a success, because he doesn't stop doing his job for a minute. And it makes you wonder how much better the movie might have been if he had even directed it.
The actual director is Kevin Bray, who's a freshman to silver screen. He is, in fact, the main problem with All About the Benjamins, which comes from his lack of attention to detail and overzealous taste for violence and explosions. Music video directors who turn to a career in film, like Michael Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) and 3,000 Miles to Graceland's Demian Lichtenstein, all seem to have the same desire for slow motion sequences and overly-dramatic action. In most cases, too, they forget to think more about how much their films make sense rather than how cool they are.
In Benjamins, there are several instances where Bray obviously lost track of what was going on -- one scene has the heroes being fired at by a thug with a bazooka, but in the next shot after the big explosion, the attacker has vanished without a trace or even a look of confusion from the main characters. And when the main villain shoots one of his own accomplices as she's being held hostage by Ice Cube, he puts a bullet directly between the eyes of the woman instead of the man who has been his enemy throughout the movie. If the bad guy is that good of a shot, why didn't he just shoot the person he's been trying to kill the whole time?
Of course, All About the Benjamins wasn't all about believability and realism in the first place. So having Ice Cube and Mike Epps generally at top form makes it an above-average movie and keeps it entertaining enough to look past the many miscues of Bray's direction.
all contents © 2002 Andy Zientek