Thug-Life

Waist Deep

Directed by Vondie Curtis Hall

Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela Directed by Thomas Allen Harris

The Devil Wears Baby Phat or Sean John or Rockawear would be a better title for Waist Deep. This ghetto thriller about an ex-con (Tyrese Gibson) robbing banks to pay ransom for his kidnapped son puts street attitude on the Hollywood runway, custom-designed to keep hip-hop audiences pacified and distracted from reality. There's even a scene where Gibson and Meagan Good (as female hustler Coco) rip-off designer Kimora Lee Simmons playing a ghetto garmento. Like The Devil Wears Prada, Waist Deep glamorizes desperate careerism. Even when portraying the demimonde of killers, hookers and thieves, Hollywood can't keep from lying about the way the world works and humans misbehave. So we're fortunate to have Thomas Allen Harris' Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela open opposite Waist Deep as counter-programming (it premieres at BAM July 5-11). Harris' docu-drama (both family memoir and historical fantasy) contrasts the impersonal hyperbole of yet another black action flick. Harris' home movie footage of his South Africa-born stepfather, Pule B. Leinaeng, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s and died in 2000, interweaves dramatizations of the man's 1950s youth as an early member of the African National Congress. Waist Deep highlights Tyson Gibson's handsome panther-like blackness, yet the fact that Gibson is Hollywood's most darkly Africanesque movie performer since Grace Jones is wasted by the film's love of the thug stereotype.

Harris' movie is different, a respectful reminder that black men can age wisely, have purpose, family, love and social commitments. (Harris' historical reenactments are impressively colorful and detailed). Twelve Disciples' complex African Oedipal portrait proves that Hollywood films like Waist Deep merely depict black males according to a superficial, fantasy model, derived from the most lurid hip-hop lore. This amounts to cultural slander and it has become a horrible, unending convention-as promoted in the midnight blaxploitation series at the IFC Center. Film mavens who accept this distortion without questioning it need to see Twelve Disciples for a corrective.

Waist Deep is a modest title for a film by people who are up to their eyeballs in crap. Writer/director Vondie Curtis Hall (who gave us Glitter) concocts a rivalry between Gibson's ex-con, dubbed O2, and a vicious former thug associate, Meat (played by rap star The Game). In Hall's plot counterpoint, South Central L.A. residents wage a simultaneous "Save Our Streets" protest rally against guns and drugs. Irony? No, just exploitation.

It is this pretense at seriousness that makes Waist Deep disgraceful. The film glosses conditions that force ghetto-dwellers into crime and desperation (O2 can only get work as a security guard) but Hall's flashy style misrepresents O2's perilous life. In the film's press kit, Hall says "I hope audiences will have a fun, crowd-pleasing ride" which undercuts the Save Our Streets sentiment. Hall's disingenuousness is colluded by race pundit Michael Eric Dyson's voice-over platitude: "It's very necessary for us to organize our dissent against the monster, Drugs." Dyson even drops the phrase "the political economy of crack," combining black academic mumbo jumbo with insouciant rhythmic rapping. Both Hall and Dyson use black social pathology as black social identity. Their venal purpose is to sell the same old Hollywood distraction of violence, sex and materialism.

For every chase scene, robbery and shoot-out, Waist Deep pauses for a bit of specious moralizing: After threatening Coco with a gun, O2 beats up her pimp saying, "Never put your hand on a woman!" After giving his son a Buffalo Soldier doll with a toy rifle, O2 berates him about playing with guns. It's no wonder the film reaches its highpoint when Meat hacks off an underling's arm and teases him/us about it. Hall continues the crude aesthetic customarily perpetuated against black audiences. Waist Deep reactivates stereotypes of thug-life criminality that were popular when NWA wore jheri curls (the soundtrack features the now passé sound of L.A. greed rap) then updates the tropes by imitating the hazy, nighttime visual style of Michael Mann's lousy Collateral. Sadly, this reliance on clichés sullies Gibson's fashionably virile image and ignores the African-American experience and social history examined in Twelve Disciples. The idea that black men could follow Nelson Mandela's example is anathema to Hollywood; thankfully, Harris turns it into poetry.