Release Date: March 26, 2004
Starring: DMX, David Arquette, Clifton Powell, Michael Ealy
Directed by: Ernest Dickerson
Written by: James Gibson
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence, drug use, sexuality, language)
You have to start somewhere in Hollywood, and for DMX that somewhere was apparently with a mostly forgettable series of martial-arts actioners whose titles read like a list of late-night B-movies on cable television (hey, wait a second): Romeo Must Die, Exit Wounds, and Cradle 2 the Grave. Now with Never Die Alone, the rapper-actor has given audiences the first sign that he’s willing to move into something more substantive -- though this movie, despite its competent direction and stylish cinematography, should not be confused with that something, only the bridge to it.
In Never Die Alone, DMX plays a mid-level New York drug dealer named King David who fled to Los Angeles after he double-crossed his boss Moon (Clifton Powell), and reinvented himself there as a kingpin by selling East Coast heroin, whose quality, apparently, is far above whatever is available out West. A decade later King returns to Gotham to set things straight, but a loose end (Michael Ealy) from his past resurfaces and he ends up getting shot in the process. Enter Paul (David Arquette), a hack journalist looking for a good story, who tries valiantly to save King by driving him to a hospital in the aftermath of the shooting. King dies, but bequeaths his car, his possessions, and his audiotape biography to Paul out of gratitude, and the movie thus details King’s spectacular rise and fall through a series of interwoven flashbacks laced with the ongoing events in the present.
Directed by Ernest Dickerson, Never Die Alone is an interesting, postmodern, film-school take on the noir genre. Shot by Matthew Libatique, it is a sea of grainy, washed out images that gives the film a studied air of nonchalance, as though Dickerson and crew were so busy making art they couldn’t be bothered with production values. In fact, the film has plenty of them: the soundtrack mixes strains of a bluesy saxophone with the thumping bass of DMX’s gangsta rap, and the camera drinks up the details of sets, from the gold piping on King’s pimped-out ghetto cruiser to the garish press-on nails worn by the barmaid at Moon’s premier nightclub.
One could be forgiven for thinking that this finely textured, richly captured world was Dickerson’s effort to compensate for a cast that is marginal at best and often downright abysmal. Despite this relatively ambitious project, DMX will never be mistaken for an actor, and although he has a throaty rage perfect for a hard-core revenge picture like this, his delivery is about as clunky as the dialogue in the James Gibson screenplay (which itself was adapted from the wildly popular cult novel by Donald Goines). The same could be said for David Arquette, who seems hell-bent on emphasizing that he is the only white guy in a movie full of black people -- a guy like this wouldn’t last 10 minutes and two blocks in uptown Manhattan.
Arquette and his character also lack screen presence, a vital attribute considering that within 20 minutes he has become the de-facto main character. King gets shot and dies in the opening act, leaving the rest of exploits to unfold in flashback with the benefit (or is it burden?) of his voice-over narration as heard by Paul on the collection of audiotapes King left behind. This is a neat twist that is sure to make the movie at least a little more successful because it involves that trendy gimmick of contemporary Hollywood, the fractured, anti-chronological narrative.
As King’s past develops, like a fresh Polaroid, it’s soon apparent there’s not much to see. King’s days in Los Angeles turn out to be an extension of his lying, cheating, thieving, back-stabbing days in New York, and at times he is downright vicious: he gets girls hooked on heroin by telling them it is cocaine, and then manipulates them like a master puppeteer. When they get to be too much of a liability, he simply substitutes battery acid for the heroin; problem solved. But although he dispenses this crooked justice from a vaguely moral standpoint -- he sees his users as corrupt, and never mind that he propagates that corruption -- the movie has a circular, nihilistic attitude exposed in the final twist. There is no redemption here, only the idea that everyone gets theirs in the end -- and that after they’re gone, it’s like they were never here in the first place.
Ultimately, the same may be said about DMX. Never Die Alone is perhaps the closest he’s come to making a real movie yet, but if a mediocre, half-put-together noir drama is his best attempt at a real movie then there won’t be many moviegoers calling for his return after he’s gone.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)