Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Let's be realistic.

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Before jumping on the bandwagon of criticism, let me elaborate the first half hour of the movie. Started indifferent, but due to the use of 90's hip-hop, indie music and the aim to be 'not your typical hood movie' I began to grow an interest. Oh boy oh boy, I was in for a tough ride.The cast was decent, but needed something stronger. The character that hold my attention was Diggy (played by Kiersey Clemons) as a gay female growing up in the suburbs. Nevertheless, she didn't play an important role in the movie. Let me first talk about the main character, Malcolm (Shameik Moore). From all the actors one could choose, why him? He portrays characters so dull and it seems that his life has been sucked down the drain, just like Netflix's The Get Down. Don't get me wrong, the first season of the Get Down was a fun ride, but not thanks to of mister Shoalin Fantastic. His method of acting is, against my liking, amateurish. He comes of as an "actor" that has been plucked from the streets to star in a movie. He lacks a certain charisma for the big screen. This already puts his character, Malcolm, in a bad spot. A totally unbelievable movie with the wrong cast. The side-characters are fun, to a certain degree, but it needed a heavy weight.The main story sounds fun on paper, but is in fact poorly executed. It felt cringe worthy most of the time. Especially filling all the gaps in between dialogue with music. Every scene it starts off with a 'hip, cool, trendy' tune. It reminds me a lot of Tangerine (2015). However, this movie used music as a certain emotion that needed to be explained. Dope just used music, because... hey why not? Dope needed something better than the typical A-class student that needs to make a short- or long-term decision. The ending is totally obvious from the start of the movie. The dialogue was off as well. Let me package and summarise my point of critique with one question. Molly/MDMA/XTC gives you the best sex ever? I don't want to be vulgar, but everyone that ever used these substances knows sex isn't or at least barely doable when this chemical is surging throughout your body. However, all critique given, it was a meh film. I was able to sit through the entire movie. Do I recommend this movie? Not really, even though I know a lot of people that like the goal the movie is aiming for, but it just doesn't prove it.

When we grow up we all have our dreams. Some want to go to college, some want to score hot babes, some want to be in a cool band, some want to be an OG, sell dope and wear a thick golden chain around their necks. And some want to shoot films about these folks.Well, it seems to me that at least Rick Famuyiwa made his dream come true. Well, in a sense that he managed to end up behind a camera and orchestrate the action in front of it. However, being a writer/director of a film doesn't give you a magic ability to truly fit the shoes of your characters. Instead, when you make a film about someone else's dreams, it's more like a story of how you imagine those dreams would be. And, in case of Dope, that's a big difference...We're all tired of those hardcore gangsta homies. So let's spin the story around a non-typical "nerd" black guy. He's the one who gets picked at by bullies and he's the one who actually plans to take the SATs. But that's just too flunky for the "tough" part of the target audience, so let's make our hero unlikely appealing to all sorts of women, getting in some nasty business with serious people, and eventually out-streetwise'ing them on the way to his dreams, so that it looks both generally satisfying and still unconventional. And yeah, let's make it all in style, just like we love it: a mix of Tarantino and Apatow, with a sprinkle of bling and hip-hop on top.Well, unfortunately, some things just don't go together well, at least not if you want believability. For example, you can't make a story of a nerdy wimp who goes nose-deep into the criminal business, to the point when he's bound to ask himself whether he's still the "good guy" he used to position himself as, gets on top of the situation and comes back to the surface as nothing but the profitable stuff stuck to him.It could've worked if Dope was trying to be Burn-After-Reading-like hilarious, because crazy things do happen when you assume that people are ridiculous. Or if Dope just remained a high-as-sh!t Pineapple-Express-kind-of flick through and through, because crazy things do happen when people are whacked out of their minds. But you don't start with the half-bizarre half-dummy approach, then go all dark and dramatic, and then go back and feed us the MC-Hammer-style dance moves during the ending credits. These numbers just don't add up.But the true problem of this movie is not those schizophrenic mood swings of its script. It's the fact that everything we see on screen tries its best not to be stereotypical and to avoid the clichés, but ends up simply fake, as if a dope dealer and a school straight-A nerd got their bodies switched, but their minds remained the same, totally ignorant of what their counterpart's life is really about. Malcolm is a geek, but only in terms of what other people might think geeks are about. Dom and Co are shady guys, but also just what you might think of them from passing them by on the street or watching a black gang movie. Neither side of this story had enough consistency to hold its weight, and the only explanation we get is that everything's "complicated". It sure as hell is, just not in the right way!The cherry on top of this festival of cardboard adventure is a scene with the purse maker. Every single thing you could've gotten wrong about people if you never actually cared to learn what they really do - it's all there. A fake bag maker who's also a blackmarket Bitcoin dealer. Who's also operating a computer with a two-button mouse with no wheel (it's 2015 guys, I really have no idea where the filmmakers dug up that fossil). Who's also testing his customers with a pseudo-insightful mumbo-jumbo speech and a demand of punching him in the jaw. Yes! If anything could beat a druggie who looks like a clown and moonlights as a mask-wearing pro hacker, that would be the only thing. Congrats guys, that's really dope.The only thing this movie didn't manage to fit inside is that if you're a black man and you don't do sports, then going to Harvard is still possible even without having to deal with arms or drugs or even pop-punk bands and videoblogging. You know, you could just be normal, doing the same boring stuff the white guys do. Maybe that's not fun enough, but at least it's real. But who wants to be real when you can go with a cool flat-top afro and a bunch of funky dance moves instead, right?

The acting, the soundtrack, the setting, the plot and the comedy were all great in this movie. It had its slow moments, but mostly the story keeps racing on in a thrilling pace. I do wish that there had been more actual 90s rap in this movie, for reasons that are obvious if you have seen the movie, but I did like the soundtrack they wound up using too.The ending lends itself to a good discussion. The moral of the story seems to be a bit darker than what really fits the rest of the picture, where the main character has to make some choices to get what he wants, because of the circumstances he is in. Now, this could be seen as him facing reality, looking away from his own world view - and that is how I prefer to look at it. But it could easily also be seen as him giving up his ideals, and getting pressured into doing what's expected from him (in some sense, I am being very vague here so that it can't be considered a spoiler).

Dope tells the story of Malcolm who is a promising college student who finds himself on the wrong side of the tracks when he attends an underground party and it is at this 'party' that Malcolm unwittingly acquires a large stash of drugs which two rival drug-dealers both claim to be their property. One of the drug-dealers is in police custody, but the other dealer is at large and will stop at nothing to get his hands on the drugs.In what I felt was a cross between Boyz N The Hood and City Of God, Dope is a film that to me tried to be everything all at once; it's a coming-of-age film, then it becomes a cat-and-mouse film, then it's a romance film, then it's a crime-caper type film. There's nothing wrong with combining all of these things, but in order to work a film like this has to have some kind of focus and that's really where a film like Dope falls down. In trying to do everything at once, it doesn't actually manage to really do anything very well and some of the strands of the story don't seem to get followed through properly (such as the drug-dealer chasing Malcolm for his drugs and what happened to Dom after he got arrested?). The romantic subplot between Malcolm and Dom's girl was underdeveloped (which was a shame as they clearly had a few things in common).I also felt that Dope was a film that just tried far too hard and seemed to sledgehammer its point home at almost every given opportunity; I think the worst example of this was when the girl kept hitting the white guy for using the N word - I mean I understand the message that Famuyiwa was trying to get across, but he completely overdoes things here and it made me cringe due to the heavy-handed and clumsy way that Famuyiwa played out this scenario.Dope is also chocked full of hipster dialogue but in an unfocused film with no solid narrative structure a lot of it just comes across as trite and boring. I could also criticise the film for offering nothing new to the genre, but that would be unfair as many films of this nature still have stories that are worth telling (no matter how unoriginal they are), but Dope was a film I could never get into and it's basically because it lacked any real intensity, it was unfocused and I never felt any connections to any of the characters. There is a twist to the story at the end which was quite amusing, but most of this film just fell flat for me.The only positive thing that I've got to say about this film is that the acting was generally good (particularly between the 3 leads), but I'm struggling to think of anything else that I liked about it in all honesty.