Gun Review

• 5th Apr 2011

Old exploitation films affected to be scandalised by the loose morality they ‘warned’ against, while using tales of adultery and nudism as an excuse to display oodles of T & A. Likewise, Gun tells you that the proliferation of weapons on our streets is deplorable while taking pornographic delight in its many, many gun battles. The climax, in every sense, involves an anti-aircraft gun. If Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson (rapper, businessman, actor, screenplay writer and Twitter’s biggest twit) is a renaissance man for the new millennium, then the new millennium is in big trouble.

Celluloid excrescence Gun is, according to the credits, Jackson’s very own writing effort. “Write what you know” goes the old adage, so Jackson has coughed up an inept version of Scarface, complete with a character named Angel. This is a shame because Jackson, a former crack dealer, knows a fair bit about crime. It is an indictment on both his writing and acting abilities that he can’t give a scene in which his character describes his parents’ murders with any punch, even though Jackson’s mother was murdered when he was 12. Instead, what we get from the man who survived being shot nine times is no more insightful than CSI: New York. It’s just the kind of movie that the creator of the moronic, offensive and ultra-violent video game 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand would come up with, so in that sense Gun met all expectations.

Jackson plays Rich, a ruthless Detroit gun-runner with lovely teeth. The very first scene is a massacre carried out by Rich at a strip club, allowing director Jessy Terrero to go nuts with the phallic imagery (pole dancer, cigars, guns).

A veteran of hip-hop and reggae videos, this is Terrero’s first feature film and, for the most part, he keeps the MTV gimmicks to a welcome minimum. Not to worry though, Gun sucks anyway. At one point a speeding car drives through a stack of empty cardboard boxes and Terrero still has a lot to learn about directing actors. The ruins of what was once Val Kilmer zombies through as Angel, and who the hell can blame him? 50 Cent is not a team player, taking the screenwriter/star’s prerogative of keeping the ‘best’ dialogue and the sex scene for himself. Lines like “this shit right here is the shit” may be the work of an inverted genius, but it’s still a blessed relief that most of Jackson’s line readings are unintelligible.

Less fun is the laundry list of guns that Rich recites to a prospective buyer – it goes on and on forever – and Jackson is unmasked as the Jeremy Clarkson of weapons when more than once a particular handgun is described as ‘the most powerful in the world’. Even worse is the leaden ‘political’ dialogue stuffed into the cops’ scenes: “How are we expected to do our jobs when we’re not given the proper support or resources?”

There’s a nasty scene where Rich strings some poor Charlie up by the ankles, gags him and takes to his toyshop with a baseball bat. This seems to exist only to allow for another Scarface nod. “They say all a man has in this world is his word and his balls, and now you ain’t got neither,” gloats Rich. Well, 50, I’ve got another Scarface quote for you – “Somebody fucked up”.

Jackson’s fondness for Scarface, the tale of a poor Cuban immigrant who becomes a rich drug lord, makes sense. Jackson was a poor, orphaned criminal who’s now a regular on the Forbes rich list. But Scarface was all the things that Gun is not; a zeitgeist defining, character-driven morality play with intelligence, insight and heart. By contrast, this is just a godsend to lazy critics who’ve been waiting to use their ‘wide of the mark’ and ‘firing blanks’ puns. Thanks, 50 Cent!

Clare Moody