Never Die Alone Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)March 22nd, 2004
NEVER DIE ALONE
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: C-
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Directed by: Ernest R. Dickerson
Written by: James Gibson, novel by Donald Goines
Cast: DMX, David Arquette, Michael Ealy, Clifton Powell, Reagan Gomez-Preston
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 3/18/04
It's a funny thing about teens. I've taught "Macbeth" in high school to inner-city kids hoping that the murder plot and the bloodshed would turn them on to the Bard. Yet despite all effort, they turn without teacher encouragement (or possibly because there is no teacher encouragement) to the complete works of Donald Goines. If you're not from the energetic urban areas where the Goines name is spoken with genuflection, you can get a copy now of his "Never Die Alone," or you can take the easy way and see the movie. You'll see why Macbeth, Brutus, Medea and Clytemnestra are choir boys and Sisters of Mercy when contrasted with the Goines family.
The movie is an adaptation of one of eighteen novels written by Donald Goines in1974, shortly before the author-ex-convict was killed in a blaze of gunfire. There's one thing you've got to say about this guy: He writes what he knows. However when the production notes say that he's better known and cherished in Europe than in the U.S., one wonders not about the press notes, necessarily but about Europeans. Goines is no James Baldwin or Richard Wright. Throughout his pulp fiction, he draws caricatures, not characters, and his dialogue has one cliche following another.
And there's at least one thing you've got to say about this film adaptation, written by newcomer James Gibson and directed by Ernest R. Dickerson ("Juice," "Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight," "Bulletproof"). Like the book on which it's based, it's filled with caricatures instead of characters, cliches instead of bon mots, and considering that photographer Matthew Libatique used real film, all but a scene or two from L.A. is dark, dark, dark, and far worse, grainy. Perhaps that's the look that Dickerson wanted if he wished for "Never Die Alone" to be considered part of the noir genre, but maybe it would have been better for the director to pop up on the screen in the beginning and say to the audience, 'Hey, dudes, I'm going to show you five minutes of grainy stuff. Then we'll shift to some decent look and let's all pretend that we're covering this as would a newscaster using a hand-held camera." What's more, the whole shebang was shot in just eighteen days. That's one of the few facts we can easily believe.
As for the story? Not too believable, nor do the flashbacks, flash-forwarded, and flash-middles cohere as, say, Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." There's a solid performance by rapper DMX as King David, a terrific job by Michael Ealy as a man whose relationship to David comes out near the conclusion. The other performances range from stiff (David Arquette as a white guy seeking to report on the underbelly of the city) to gross (Antwon Tanner as drug kingpin, Blue). To the film's credit, there are so many unintentional laughs that (quote me on this), it's the funniest picture of the year to date. That alone makes the film watch-able--enjoyable even.
The folks who inhabit the story are the sort who, as students in junior high school some time back, must have spent more time in the principal's office every day than in their classrooms.
As for classic resonance, look for an Oedipal theme, revealed in the concluding moments, and foreshadowed (though not intentionally by anyone in on this project), by references to Oedipus in epithets from the mouths of the gangstas and their ho's throughout. DMX inhabits the role of the central personage, King David (hmm, biblical references as well as Greek mythological allusions). David has been a baaaad man and in what becomes his final year on the planet, he wants to make amends, to redeem himself (though dictating a series of audiotapes about the last ten years of his screwed-up life hardly counts a redemption, but if that's the best he can do, we'll give him credit).
Paying off drug kingpin Blue (Antwon Tanner) with thirty large (though in truth he owed only eight) should have gotten him a new life, but ironically was to cause his violent demise. In the story's most improbable conceit, a dying David bequeaths his final effects, including a quarter of a mil and a pimpmobile, to the white boy whom he knows for a half hour or so, a journalist who makes sure that David will not die alone. Part of those effects is a series of tapes laying out the last decade of David's life. As David plays the cassettes, we flash back to various stages therein. We watch the handsome, smooth ladies' man and prospering drug dealer make the acquaintance of a New Yorker, Edna (Keesha Sharp), a TV actress in L.A., Janet (Jennifer Sky), and finally a genuinely uncorrupt college student working in a bar, Juanita (Reagan Gomez-Preston). While some guys today use the date-rape drug on their less compliant girlfriends, David would sneak heroin in the cocaine, addicting them and making the women dependent on him. When they threaten to call the cops if he refuses to keep the drugs flowing, he makes sure they do not.
"Never Die Alone," with a running time of 82 minutes (89 with the credits), does not overstay its welcome (except for the Sundance festival audience members who allegedly walked out), possesses adrenaline-like energy, and a series of strong, rap tunes including a couple of DMX himself, but its ambiance is overly dark given the grainy photography, is laden with hackneyed or pretentious dialogue ("We reap what we sow"), and like the novel on which it's based does not offer a single character with more than two dimensions.
It is fun, though, and for that we award it a gentleman's C.
Rated R. 89 minutes.(c) 2004 by Harvey Karten at
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