Review of Turn It Up

Introduction

Hip-hop stars Pras and Ja Rule are really stretching their oeuvres in this vehicle, where they play petty gangsters struggling to get a foot-hold in the music industry. Pras is the gifted rapper-songwriter who only hustles, maims and kills to pursue his dream (oh, poor bunny) whereas Ja Rule is his psychotically violent best-friend, so obsessed with the upward trajectory of their music-career, that he’s willing to do anything to sustain it. Oh, and Pras has a nagging girlfriend... oh, and Jason Statham, that husky-voiced chappy from ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ plays a highly unconvincing mob-boss… oh and Vondie-Curtis Hall (‘Chicago Hope’, ‘Gridlockd’) turns up as Pras’ estranged but incessantly wise father…. Oh and…

Video

Average anamorphic. The low budget is evident in the sparse number of locations, so there’s little visual interest.

Audio

No 5.1, but the stereo track is serviceable enough, all that really matters is the mindless gunplay and hip hop banter.

Features

A trailer, but nothing else. Not even scene selection.

Conclusion

“Yo bitch, u f***in’ up my s***, I’ll bust a cap in your motherfu…” Lame action/drama/hood/musical that can barely sustain the dramatic tension of individual scenes, never mind the constituency required to cohere an entire movie. Alas, the result is so amateurish as to be simply baffling in its rambling incoherence and feeble attempts at plotting and emotional depth: Pras has to learn paternal responsibility and to draw a line with the unmitigated violence of his friend, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, Pras is so wooden a thesp, that he could be deemed a fire-hazard on a hot, dry day; and Ja Rule Joe-Pesci’s his way through the gratuitous violence and obscenity-laden script.

Incoherence and ineffectuality aside however, this whole venture is an inexcusably narcissistic attempt for the now successful stars to revisit their past and re-envision what may have been squandered (artistic credibility) and jazz up their relative conventionality with bursts of gruesome violence displaying how anarchically violent they were (or perhaps are.) However, ‘Turn it Up’ lapses into generic farce before the main credits have even finished rolling and the laughable ineptitude continues unabated to a bloodbath finale where our hero is predictably the last man standing, and a conclusion that sees him drive off into the sunset with his interchangeable girlfriend, on his way to fame and fortune… the countless splatted corpses are presumably deemed an occupational hazard. Childish and inane.