“HUSTLE & FLOW” (2005)

Starring: Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson, DJ Qualls, Ludacris & Isaac Hayes
Written & Directed by Craig Brewer

Polly Staffle Rating: *

How hard is it really for a pimp? He has a commodity that easily sells. It’s not like he has to be a used car salesmen and swindle his buyers into signing a contract that has them paying off a ride for five years. A pimp doesn’t do much that I can see. A hit man has it harder and no one sings about that. At least killers-for-hire do their own dirty work. Prostitutes have it rough too. They work for money having sex with strangers and then hand the cash they made over to a poor ol’ pimp. Maybe it’s just me, but being a pimp doesn’t seem that hard. And if his prices are as low as they are in “Hustle & Flow,” $20 for front and $40 for back, the product should sell like hot cakes. I used the tired “hot cakes” cliché on purpose. My uncle Tim once told me he wrote that in a school essay and his teacher had never heard it before and thought he was a genius, but for the rest of us, we’ve heard it so many times, it is almost ridiculous to use. That’s how I felt about this film. It is riddled with so many overused elements, it’s like we’ve seen it before a thousand times.

Terrance Howard, who has been acting in films for more than a decade, was nominated for an Oscar and highly acclaimed for his portrayal of Djay. I don’t get the hoopla. He’s basically playing the same character he played in “Dead Presidents,” maaaaaan. The film’s anthem, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” won best song. It’s nothing groundbreaking either. It sounds like a hundred other songs and the whole pimping being hard thing has been covered before by Ice Cube, Big Daddy Kane, Ice-T and many, many more. Does the phrase “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy” ring any bells? As for the film’s plot, what we have here is basically the unoriginal “8 Mile” crossed with The Hughes Brothers documentary “American Pimp” and their epic “Dead Presidents.” That’s all rolled into a slick, non-offensive waste of time with a glossy Ron Howard feel to it.

This is a movie about pimping, yet there is no sex. It’ a movie about pimping being hard, yet all Djay does is sit around all day crying that he wishes he was a rapper. He doesn’t get arrested for pimping. He doesn’t get harassed by police. He doesn’t get his ass beat by another pimp. His girl never has problems he has to get her out of. Yes, I said girl as in singular. He has one prostitute working for him - a flat-chested white country bumpkin with a mop for hair named Nola (Taryn Manning). Nola lives with him, the pregnant unemployed prostitute Shug (Taraji Henson) and Djay’s girlfriend stripper Lexus (Paula Jai Parker). If this pimp wasn’t so lazy, he might get up off his ass and recruit some new girls. Instead he plays with his little Casio synthesizer he bought from a drug addict and writes rhymes. I guess this film is supped to be inspirational. I’m supposed to feel like I can do anything. After watching this, I feel like I was hustled. I’ve been ripped off by a pimp that was all talk and no game. I held up my end of the bargain and invested my time and money in his product and he let me down like the only hooker he had available was not only toothless, but also completely bodiless like Damon Wayons’ character Detective Head on “In Living Color.”

By the time Anthony Anderson shows up as the character Key to recite some clichéd quotes about people that talk the talk and those that walk the walk, I had already given up on this film. But I continued to watch as Key, Shelby (D.J. Qualls), Djay and his girls record a rap demo in a makeshift studio. The crew is putting their all into the demo in hopes of passing it along to big time rapper Skinny Black, played by Ludacris. By the way, why is it all rappers think they must act in movies? Many of them are horrible actors, but studios continue to stick them in their films because of the name recognition. Ice-T can act, Ice Cube can sort of, Tupac was great and rapper Marky Mark turned actor Mark Whalberg can act his ass off. Other than those four, nobody else has really shown me much. How come there aren’t any rappers that want to be country singers? And how come Oscar winning actors like Anthony Hopkins, Sean Penn or Adrien Brody never want to rap? Back to the movie, so Djay puts all this time and energy that he could be using to recruit hookers into an idiotic plan. He’s going to give his demo to Skinny Black on a cassette tape when the rapper is in town. A cassette tape? If I was a “somebody” and I was handed a cassette tape to listen to, I’d piss on it. They might as well have put their demo on eight track. This is like somebody sending me a movie they made on Viewmaster or the record playing/slide projecting Show-N-Tell and expecting me to have equipment to watch it. Somebody also might as well hand Bill Gates kick ass software they’ve developed on an Atari cartridge. Anyway, Djay and Skinny go way back together he claims. Djay’s plan is to hit him up at a bar when Skinny is out relaxing. This is going to make him a big time rapper? I see, so if I want to sell a screenplay all I have to do is slide it under the stall while Terrance Howard is taking a dump in a restaurant and the check is mine. Also am I supposed to be shocked if Terrance Howard instead uses my script to wipe his ass and then flushes it down the toilet? That’s actually what someone should have done to this script.

The sad part is, this film actually opens pretty good and also closes decently. But everything in between is almost unbearable. If I had to rank this among the classic rap movies, it might have the Mario Van Pebbles film “Rappin’” beat, but it doesn’t hold a candle to “Krush Groove” or “Disorderlies.” And neither of those are even that good. Still, if I had the choice between owning “Hustle & Flow” on DVD and either of those on Show-N-Tell, I’d take “Krush Groove.” I’d have to borrow my dad’s record player and hold the slides to a light, but at least when I felt like I was watching something I had already seen before that was old and outdated, I actually would be.

-CCF, April 2006