Belly? More like Crap Factory!

Things that were good about the Hype Williams movie Belly:

1) Method Man was in it, Ghostface apparently showed up for half of a second and the Wu Wear store was mentioned.

2)The film was lit distinctly. Perhaps not well, but at least inventively. Many shots had some sort of wannabe-Argento filter thing going on.

3) DMX barked every line.

Other than that, not so good. Belly is a really boring movie. Its pacing is horrible, making the worrying lack of violence and nudity all the more noticeable. The films features a lot of cussing and tons of dudes smoking weed but those are the distant, underwhelming cousins of sweet action. You get the feeling that Hype couldn't handle shooting very many sequences that featured stuff actually happening, so he compensated with endless, smokey conversations in fancy cars.

The lack of nudity is strange as well, as one would figure that being free of the network content standards so often placed upon Hype would allow the music video director to go buck-wild with gratuitous boobery. I'm pretty sure there's nudity in only one scene. You at least get to kinda see DMX's ass, but in bogusly underlit circumstances. As it's directed by a rap music video auteur, one would expect this movie to make full use of its potential to take place in a strip club yet Hype is more concerned with introducing one meaningless character after another instead of having asses bounce in slow-motion for 90 minutes. For shame. Also, since a bunch of plot points are delivered via this dude speaking thick Jamaican patois WITH A MOUTH FULL OF GRILLS I have no idea what went on in this film. Why did the guy with feathers in his mohawk get shot? Where was NaS for the bulk of the film? Did Meth die or not? I don't know and this movie makes it impossible to care.