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August 24, 2007
Illegal Tender
(out of four)
For a straight-A college kid, Wilson DeLeon Jr. isn't all that smart. Somehow, he managed to go 21 years without asking how his single stay-at-home mom could afford the mansions they lived in, or why the family had to relocate every few years like refugees in a witness protection program. But as soon as two assassins show up at the front door, he's suddenly full of questions.
Illegal Tender is the sort of crime movie in which nothing, not one detail, has been observed from real life; it's composed entirely of fantasies and falsehoods lifted from bad movies and hip-hop videos. It wants to be Scarface but makes The Pacifier look plausible by comparison. (Do real bodyguards ever aim their guns sideways?)
According to Wilson's mother (Wanda De Jesus), examine any form of success closely, you're sure to find stains. In their family's case, at the same time Millie was giving birth to Wilson Jr., a Puerto Rican drug lord named Javier (Gary Perez) was gunning down Wilson Sr. across town. But Millie was smart enough to invest her husband's illicit earnings in Microsoft stock — if she were really smart, she would've sold it all in 2000 — providing the family with enough clean money that Wilson could pretend to live like a gangsta, pimped out Dodge Charger and all, without ever having to know the life his father led.
There are at least two really promising movies that might have been made with the ideas wasted on this one. First, instead of sending in scrawny Wilson Jr. (who's never shot a gun in his life) to settle the score with Javier, the movie could have examined how he comes to terms with his past. Second, it could have focused on Millie immediately after her husband was murdered, when her money was tied up, and she had to be most resilient about protecting her family.
Instead, writer-director Franc. Reyes (who also directed Empire, in which another South Bronx drug dealer gets mixed up in the stock market) spins a dead-end mystery about why Javier would still care about settling this particular score. But directing is about more than knowing where to put the camera, and no amount of quick swoops or Dutch angles can correct the fact that Reyes can't coach proper performances from his cast.
Gonzalez, 28, is too old to be playing a naive college boy, his ghetto affectations at odds with the silver-spoon childhood his character enjoyed. And as satisfying as it is to see De Jesus burst through her front door with both guns blazing, she's no Pam Grier. You just don't buy it.
The fact that all this phoniness earned John Singleton's seal of approval (the Boyz N the Hood director serves as the film's producer) calls the authenticity of his own movies into question. Illegal Tender features all of the clichés but none of the polish seen in Hustle & Flow (another, far superior Singleton-sponsored enterprise), proving he's graduated to exploiting the urban audience he once represented.
[as featured in The Miami Herald]
Posted by Peter Debruge on