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Waist Deep"Never put your hands on a woman," warns ex-con O2 (Gibson) as he thumps the bejesus out of another faceless goon. It's okay, though, because besides his tendency to fight violence with violence and a roving eye that's mimicked by camerawork so libidinous it leaves no cleavage shot uncovered, O2 is still emphatically the good guy.
How do we know? For a start he's desperate to go straight, but the streets won't let him. He's also the single parent of improbably wide-eyed cutie Junior (Hall), whose babymomma ran off while O2 was in the clink. Finally, he dispenses braindead, bull-headed but defiantly PC advice (see above), with a perpetual sneer at the depravity of the gang life he's trying - and failing - to leave behind.
After all, it wasn't his fault Lucky (Tate) was too stoned to pick Junior up from school. It wasn't his fault he had to leave work without handing in his gun. And it certainly wasn't his fault a carjacking lead to Junior's kidnapping, leaving him with 24 hours to find $100,000 ransom money, with only his 'bitch', Coco (Good), and his wits to save him.
Waist Deep clearly has aspirations towards muscular thrillers such as Training Day and Falling Down, which pulse with urban anxiety. The film plays out against an anti-gun crime protest and we are reminded of how children are all too frequently caught in the crossfire, but there is an untenable gap between the grit it wishes to portray and the gloss with which it does so. This is, in fact, Commando in the 'hood - a tame action flick that desperately wants to be a drama, thereby skimping on the action.
As O2 and Coco rob banks, swapping cars and costumes along the way, the film feels like a poor PlayStation game played by someone else, and their quest for cash echoes the empty culture of extravagance and accumulation that mainstream hip-hop rests upon - think P Diddy rather than Public Enemy.
To their credit, Good and Gibson give key scenes some emotional credibility, the former fleshing out a role that amounts to little more than a curvy clotheshorse and the latter showing that he understands that the essence of screen acting is to do it with your eyes. Fellow rapper The Game doesn't fare quite so well, but then his character, the evil Meat, has had one of his poked out in lieu of a proper backstory.
What comes through most is how anaesthetised the filmmakers are to the violence they appear to condemn, but what galls is not the hypocrisy of this garbled message, but the cackhandedness with which it is conveyed.
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