Get Rich or Die Tryin' - R
Common Sense Note
Parents should know that younger teens are going to want to see this movie. It includes frequent violence (shooting, stabbing, fist fights), and consequences (loss of friends and family, funerals, desires for revenge and discussions of alternatives). The hero appears in the hospital, in emergency surgery, and near death, as the film flashes back to his birth in a diner. A woman is burned to death in her home (her killer claims to have raped her first, though we don't see this). The hero starts his drug dealing career as a child, shoots rivals, and is shot himself, in a brutal scene shown twice. Prisoners fight in a shower, showing naked bodies and bloody effects of stabbing and beating. One sex scene includes close-ups of body parts. Dialogue and lyrics include frequent cursing (including f-word and n-word).
Families can discuss Marcus' choices: to be a drug dealer (to "get paid") or to try another route to "get out of the ghetto." How does the movie make Marcus sympathetic despite the fact that we see him shoot another dealer? How does this story add to the myth that 50 Cent has created about his life? Does the movie glamorize a violent lifestyle? Do your kids think this movie is true?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
In the mythic, formulaic, and utterly earnest GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN', everybody loves Marcus (50 Cent). The movie follows his noble, occasionally violent, rarely legal attempts to get out of the hood. He appears repeatedly in the sort of elegant, evocative filtered-light frames favored by director Jim Sheridan and DP Declan Quinn. This visual softening underlines Marcus' fundamental decency and devotion to his mother, feisty, hoop-earringed dealer Katrina (Serena Reeder), killed when the boy is only eight years old (played as a child by the affecting Marc John Jeffries). Hearing of her death, little Marcus hunkers down in a corner in his grandparents' home, determined to hide his emotions from then on.
Luckily, he's surrounded by friends, family, and would-be killers who repeatedly declare their love for him. Prominent among his devotees are his Grandma (Viola Davis), his slightly more skeptical Grandpa (Sullivan Walker), and his first and apparently only girlfriend, Charlene (child Rhyon Nicole Brown, grown up Joy Bryant). Earnest and quietly supportive of her man, she serves primarily to secure his heterosexuality, the usual role for The Girl in homosocial romance.
Get Rich opens with Marcus' shooting -- based on 50 Cent's famous "nine times" -- by a hoodied associate, who does, in his way, love him. As Marcus lies broken and alone in the street, his voiceover takes you back to his youth, his mom's mighty efforts to supply him with new sneakers and his own efforts to protect her. Feeling sad and guilty about her death, Marcus also seeks to know his father, noting early on, "Everyone was in love with my mom, so anyone could be my dad," except, he adds, a white man or a cop.
This search leads him to a series of relationships with outsized men, including head gangster Levar (Bill Duke), brutal Majestic (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and most notably, Marcus' very vocal cellmate Bama (Terrence Howard). A flashback to their first meeting in a prison shower demonstrates Bama's instant devotion: when Marcus is assaulted by a shank-wielding inmate, Bama jumps into the melee (several naked, hard-bodied men are soon slipping and sliding in water and soap and blood). The scene cuts to Bama and Marcus, now friends for life, handcuffed and naked on the shower floor, side by side.
Bama's offer to be his manager boosts Marcus' own decision to leave the street life and dedicate himself to rapping (50's only full-on rap performance, as Marcus' alter ego Young Caesar, comes under the film's closing credits). The partners' release from prison leads directly to a collision with Majestic, who feels possessive toward Marcus, wanting his "hardest working" dealer to help in their ongoing turf wars with stereotypical "Colombians." Before it ends, the movie circles back to Marcus' shooting, reframed as a rebirth: as Marcus lies on an ER surgery table, the doctors wondering how he's still breathing, the scene cuts back to Katrina giving birth, all screams and sweat and pain.
On finding that Marcus is still alive, Majestic provides Get Rich's most hysterical love. After he assaults one non-Marcus associate with a machete (which he apparently keeps in his apartment for just such raging occasions), Majestic arrives for Marcus' big opening at a local club. Unable to convince his onetime protégé to step back, Majestic goads him into a fight. Barely conscious after he's been throttled and beaten, Majestic gurgles, "I love you, man." Everybody does.
Families who like this movie might also want to see 8 Mile, Paid in Full, Strapped, and Menace II Society.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSexual language and slang for genitals; two sex scenes (one implied, the second shot in softlit body-part close-ups); naked male prisoners fight in a shower (long shot on this scene holds for a couple of minutes, to show bodies in desperate struggle). |
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ViolenceShooting opens the film (brutal assault on hero, who then tells his story in flashback); multiple shootings, stabbings, fist fights, and one death by machete. |
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LanguageFrequent cursing (including f-word) and use of n-word, in dialogue and lyrics. |
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Social BehaviorAgain, the hero is a drug dealer, though he learns to "express himself" in music rather than violence. |
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CommercialismYoung characters yearn for new sneakers; discussion of wanting money to buy shoes and other gear. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoHero is a drug dealer who goes straight; film includes smoking, drinking, and drug use and making. |
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