Setup (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Mike Gunther. Starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Ryan Phillippe, Bruce Willis.
Badly written, badly acted film about bad people.
During a diamond heist with his two best pals, Sonny (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) is betrayed and goes off on a poorly conceived mission of revenge.
50 Cent is not a good actor, but he's near the top of the class in this wreck. About a third of the cast members look and sound like they're reading their lines off their costars' foreheads.
Sonny is no anti-hero; he's supposed to be a genuinely good guy with some endearing flaws, like a habit of firing bullets into crowds of people. We know he's a good guy because 1) he sits in a church and has trite conversations about faith with a stereotypical black priest, 2) he helps a kid reach a light bulb on a shelf in a store (to be fair, the kid really seems to want that light bulb), and 3) the bullets he fires into crowds somehow never hit anyone.
It's one of the worst scripts of any crime film in history. Packed with underwhelming plot twists, laughable religious overtones, and clumsy homages to Quentin Tarantino, the movie is little more than a collection of heist movie clichés packed into a very expensive sandbox for a rapper who wants to play actor. (MMA fighter Randy Couture is also given a toy shovel).
Bruce Willis shows up as well, getting top billing for a 10-minute role as a mob boss. We are assured that he is cunning and ruthless, but this is called into question by his astonishing gullibility for Sonny's suicidally stupid schemes. Reality has a strange way of bending itself to Sonny's benefit, or at least to the benefit of some very lazy writers.
An amateur effort all around.
Rated R for poor trigger discipline.
2 out of 5
