★★½
“Thug life.”
Rhanni (Brown) falls for the notorious Florida drug-dealer Seven (Bird) hard – to the extent she’s prepared to overlook the fact he’s married. Instead, she becomes his best friend, and works alongside him in the pharmaceutical business. When he is gunned down by his rivals, Rhanni decides to take what she has learned and put it into practice. She assembles her team of loyal but brutal associates, and sets out to take over the town. This brings her unwanted attention from two groups. Firstly, the authorities, who are always seeking to snare one of her underlings, and get him to snitch on his boss. More lethally, there’s the mysterious “Genie”, the current top dog, whose face no-one has seen. Genie sends Lil’ Miller (Michele) to take out Rhanni, only for the hitwoman to throw her lot in with the intended target.
This is one of those where I am very clearly not the target audience, and I had to keep the closed captions on to figure out every second word – basically, the ones which weren’t “nigga”, sprinkled around here as frequently as a Valley Girl uses “like”. The only reason I mind, is because it gets pretty repetitive. Authentic? Possibly: I’m not exactly in a position to comment. The aim seems to be something like a distaff version of Scarface (or La Reina Del Sur, though this 2010 film pre-dates the TV series by a year), but the film just doesn’t have the budget to be able to deliver anything like its ambitions. As a result, those who are supposedly on the top of the heap, seems to spend a startling amount of time in cheap apartments and casual restaurants – the kind of place where, I kid you not, the shrimp alfredo arrives 30 seconds after the characters order it.
Credit this for being a little more thoughtful than I expected, with Rhanni eventually deciding to escape the thug life and start a record-label (no prizes for guessing how that goes), and a final moral that’s more effective than I expected. This might perhaps be because the director is a woman – something I wasn’t aware of, given a non-gender specific name, until the end credits where she is listed as playing a waitress. There’s definitely too much bad rap, playing almost permanently in the background, which does nothing to enhance the atmosphere, and at times the result feels more like a poverty-row music video than a genuine feature film. Despite this, I’m not averse to watching the sequel, which sees the return of Lil’ Miller – likely the most energetic and interesting character here.
But not Rhanni. For, in a creepy bit of art imitating life, Jokisha Brown was gunned down in an Atlanta parking lot in July 2016, a few months after her brother was shot dead at a Jacksonville strip-club. [Her ex-boyfriend was arrested the following April and is a “person of interest”, according to the most recent reports] That’s a level of method acting to which even Al Pacino wouldn’t go.
Dir: Gin X
Star: Jokisha “Dynasty” Brown, Krystal Michele, Jacoby “Beam” Freeman, Tearon “Nephew” Bird