★★
“Car trouble.”
It’s hard to believe a film rated two stars exceeded expectations, but when I saw this had scored just 1.7 out of ten on the IMDb, I was braced for something much worse. I mean, cross off the friends of the cast and crew who scored it a “10”, and 72% of voters have given it the lowest mark possible. Make no mistake, this isn’t great. It’s not even good. But this is not quite as irredeemably bad as that score would imply.
The story concerns the car thief gang of the title, including Ciara (Johnson) and Pretty (Manning), who work under the heavy thumb of South Central (Núñez). They target a party being held by rappers High Rollaz, not realizing the trunk of one car lifted contains the only copy of a master tape for the High Rollas latest album. The trio, led by Millions (Green), start to follow the Dawgs’s trail, only for things to get complicated when Ciara and one of the High Rollaz fall for each other.
Made in 2009, the production values here are shaky at best, with the video in particular not having aged well. You could likely record better quality footage on a medium-end phone these days, and the sound might well be improved, too. The story is woefully thin: there are scenes which either stay far beyond their purpose (unless that purpose was to showcase one of the rap songs on the soundtrack), or don’t appear to serve any purpose at all. The action, such as it is, is very poorly-executed: the Dawgs do very little actual crime after the opening sequence. Basically, rob the party and that’s it.
And, yet… On a couple of occasions, the film did surprise me. For instance, there’s one scene where South Central forces one of his minions to play Russian Roulette, and it’s genuinely disturbing. Núñez’s acting experience is apparent, and weirdly, his performance here reminded me of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s portrayal of Negan in The Walking Dead (which, obviously, it well pre-dates). There’s the same sense he’s entirely unhinged, and could go off into insane violence at any moment. We also get the Most Unexpected Star Trek Reference of All-Time, when a drug dealer says of his product that it will, “Get you high, like Captain Kirk… The young Kirk, the one getting all the alien pussy.” I laughed, anyway.
I’m certainly not the intended audience here, yet I can’t imagine even its target would be able to look past the shoddier aspects, despite what feels like a certain veneer of urban authenticity to the dialogue and characters. It plods on, entirely as you’d expect, to the final face-off, when the High Rollaz try to execute a deal with South Central and his crew, for the return of their tape. I sense the actresses here were chosen more for their visual appeal – it seems most of them were models – rather than their acting ability. Though since they get precious little to do here, it’s very difficult to tell whether or not they have any talent. They do nail the “looking pretty” thing, close to impeccably.
Dir: Chris Rogers
Star: Sherina Manning, Azur-De Johnson, Will Green, Miguel A. Núñez Jr.