Belly

The unremarkable presence of a gaggle of rap stars is just part of the problem with this ill advised first feature. Working with Spike Lee's cinematographer Maleek Sayeed, HipHop promo director Williams indulges in a stream of stylised compositions: characterisation is absent and the narrative feels like a cosmetic overlay. Insofar as there's any story, it's about a posse of drug dealers falling out over their vision of the future. (Nasty, brutish and short? Or to retire and start a family?) An unrelenting spectacle of guns, girls, drugs, cash, cars, clubs and cool apartments, scored to endless use of the term 'nigga', it looks suspiciously like a deliberate exercise in audience alienation.