STRAPPED
A film review by Chuck Dowling
Copyright 1996 Chuck Dowling
(TV-1993) *1/2 - C:Bokeem Woodbine, Michael Biehn, Craig Wasson.
Yet another in a long line of "hood" movies, and this one is just as bad as the rest. "Strapped" tells us the story of Diquan, a teenaged ex-con with a heart made of gold and a mind made of cheese. Diquan has a pregnant girlfriend and a steady job as a delivery boy. Then, his girlfriend is arrested for selling crack (for the third time) and she's facing a long stretch in jail. So, you know, he's got to do whatever it takes to get the bail money for her. This means he's got to sell guns to ten year old kids. Any sympathy I might have had for this character was gone after that. Then there's "the man", a white police officer (Biehn) who wants to help Diquan get his girl out of jail if he'll give him information as to who's selling guns on the streets to ten year old kids. Of course "whitey" is the bad guy here, wanting to get those guns off the streets and all, sheesh. So anyway, by the end of the film Diquan is facing with his toughest decision, should he save his crack dealing girl or should he save his gun selling buddy. Instead he cops out and comes up with the most ridiculous solution, which then renders the entire film as being completely pointless.
First-time director Forest Whitaker does an impressive job with the film. It's a very well made movie, except that every ten minutes or so the action is interrupted by a few seconds of the main character jumping up and down while listening to rap music. The problem here is with the script. First, you've got no one to like here. You keep trying to like Biehn's character but the film keeps telling you not to, cause he's "whitey". And Diquan keeps an attitude about him like "Yeah? So what if she was selling crack? She's pregnant! Let her out!" Also, the whole entire movie is basically slang, and it's very difficult to understand. For example, Diquan's heartfelt comments to a friend of his that he sees shoot another kid: "Yo man you WHACKED!" Touching. But, there is an appearance by the fat kid from "Lean on Me", so you make up your own minds. "Strapped" was made for HBO.
Have A Question Or Comment? Email Me At chuckd21@southeast.net
-- Chuck Dowling Visit Chuck's Movie Reviews at http://users.southeast.net/~chuckd21/ Over 1,500 movies rated and/or reviewed! Movie news, box office reports, film related links, and reader's polls and reviews.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews