5/10

I would think that a film about 90’s hip hop music and fashions would intrigue me to the point of must see cinema for the little film that could, known as Dope. The film has a nice message to the kids who don’t fit in during high school, as it shows them that being different can sometimes be beneficial to being overlooked when taking the tough roads to acheive your success. The movie stars Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a straight A student faced with the tensions of surviving life in a tough neighborhood in Los Angeles while juggling college applications, academic interviews, and the SAT. A chance invitation to an underground party leads him into an adventure that could allow him to go from being a geek, to being dope, while opening up to a life that is foreign to him. What the film has going for it works in spades. The artistic direction in cinematography is tightly shot to give you some different angles for a city that has had more than it’s fair share of movies based in. The wardrobe and soundtrack are by far the best things about the film, and serve as a callback to the 90’s golden age of hip hop when all of the big colors and hairstyles dominated the market. It’s all a nostalgic tribute to a time in place where the streets were at their most transparent with many upper class people getting a lyrical education into their world. So why do i score Dope so low? Simply put, sloppy filmmaking. The movie seems to have a problem with tone selections as to how the movie is going to proceed for the 95 minute run time, and it never quite figures it out. The opening 40 minutes of the film are treated as an almost stoner comedy when crossed with the awkwardness of being an African American nerd. It’s certainly an original side of cinema that we haven’t seen a lot of, but it doesn’t work when in the second half of the film the movie tries to be like those films like “Higher Learning” or “Boyz In The Hood”, and it just doesn’t mix well. Seperately, these films would be great one hour short films by themselves, but together it all feels uneven. There are also those scenes that drag on for far too long. Many of the edits come way too late in a shot where yet another character is trying to come off as a weirdo behaviorally influenced by drugs. I personally wish the movie would’ve ignored more of the comedic efforts and aimed more for the second half of the movie which heavily guards this nice zero to hero storyline surrounded by filler. Characters also disappear for long stretches of the movie. We aren’t just talking about secondary characters here, but Malcolm’s love interest is gone for at least forty minutes during a time when their chemistry could’ve been built to make us care more about their ending. I was quite surprised to see that this film is getting almost entirely unanimous positive reviews when i was checking out feedback online. I certainly have never had a problem standing against the critics, and there is enough in Dope to make the title feel like more than just a slang term. The movie is completely overburdened with too much in too little of time, and as a result, we are given thinly directed characters in a plot that doesn’t follow the formula of less being more. If you have to see this film, i recommend a DVD viewing. I am sure a lot of people will disagree with my opinion on this film, but if you look at the huge holes that plague this movie, you won’t be influenced by the critics who itch to see their name in commercial text.