It is easy to dismiss the 2005 Curtis Jackson film vehicle as another value-less part of the money-generating automaton that 50 Cent became (if he was ever anything else). However, ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’’ might deserve a very prompt re-assessment in light of current events.
Apart from defying most of the basic rules of good cinema and storytelling in general, it does offer some sort of reflection of popular culture in the last ten years and therefore some of the ideas that have gained currency in society as a whole, not least the self-centred short sightedness of personal greed and unrestrained capitalism.
With reports of the current financial crisis being rammed down our throats on a daily basis there have been calls for a new Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character from Oliver Stone’s eighties classic Wall Street. This has even resulted in the news that a Wall Street sequel is lined up so we can all utter the phrase “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” in a disparaging contemporary way at these bastard bankers and politicians. However, we seem to have missed the fact that a film that better summed up these times has already been made. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was Wall Street 2, and for a new slogan to rival ‘greed is good’ just look at the bloody title. 50 Cent’s film neatly bundles all of our misplaced values into a tidy little package. We haven’t been seeking intrinsic value, only the monetary value we have created, and a generation of people aspire to nothing more than money. The archetypical hero du jour is, or at least should be, good old Fiddy, who in his biopic tells us how he got rich, while caring about very little else, and lacking any real discernible talent. Just don’t blame him, blame yourself for funding him.
The film tries to follow that all-too-familiar rags to riches storyline, popular since at least as far back as Dickens, coupled with all the usual clichés prevalent in all the weak hip hop biopics and those films that I will call ‘Nouvelle Vague Blaxploitation’ (in an effort to make myself sound intelligent; you know, young man struggling in the ghetto/it’s a hard knock life).
A young Curtis Jackson, who is fatherless, which is apparently the reason for his later misdemeanors, loses his mother, a part time prostitute/crack head/crack dealer/hoe bag. He attends the funeral. He does not cry. Curtis is then shipped off to live with his blue collar grandparents before falling into a life of gangs and street crime (although it just looks like petty drug deals to me). Understandably he pursues this life initially to fund the purchase of new trainers that he really really wants. He then embarks on a life of blow, money and gang rivalries. He gets shot lots of times. He does cry. He then fulfills his (apparently long standing) dream of becoming an MC and somewhere in the middle he gets a girl (by making a mix tape and rapping about ‘cuming in her hair’) and has a kid. There’s some internal gang politics in the mix as well.
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The Grain 