All About the Benjamins

Starring Ice Cube and Mike Epps
Written by Ronald Lang and Ice Cube
Directed by Kevin Bray
website: www.benjaminsmovie.com

IN SHORT: Too many [expletive deleted]s bored the [expletive deleted] out of us. [Rated R for language and violence. 100 minutes]

Ice Cube's mom, Ice Tray, should head right for the mini-mart to pick up some soap to clean out her pride and joy's guttermouth because he's gone above and beyond the need for street creds in All About the Benjamins. It's one thing to drop a [expletive deleted]load of four letter words into your dialog to establish street credibility. It's quite another when the expletives get in the way of telling the story that you want to tell. Cube is co-writer of All About the Benjamins and so must take the blame for cussing our attention span into a state of ... gee, what's the word we want ... [expletive deleted]in' boredom.

Somewhere, deep down in its gangsta rap targeted heart and soul, All About the Benjamins is supposed to be a comedy with money and blood and torture and all that good [expletive deleted]that may make gangsta kidlets or wannabees cackle with glee. By the time it got there, we didn't give a [expletive deleted]. Most of the First Act sounded like this:

Ice Cube
Yo mother[expletive deleted] ! I'm the nastiest [expletive deleted] bounty hunter in Miami and your mother[expletive deleted] [slang for a body part deleted] is [expletive deleted]in' busted!
Mike Epps
But I won the [expletive deleted] Lottery! The mother [expletive deleted] Sixty Million [expletive deleted] Dollar Lottery!
Ice Cube
AN' I DON'T GIVE A [expletive deleted]!
Mike Epps
But...
Ice Cube
I STILL DON'T GIVE A [expletive deleted]!
Mike Epps
[expletive deleted] you mother[expletive deleted]
Ice Cube
NO! [expletive deleted] YOU!
Mike Epps
No [expletive deleted] YOU!
Ice Cube
[expletive deleted] YOU!
Mike Epps
[expletive deleted] YOU! Mother[expletive deleted]
Ice Cube
[expletive deleted] YOU!
Mike Epps
[expletive deleted] YOU! [slang for a body part deleted] hole. Those mother[expletive deleted]s that shot at your sorry [slang for a body part deleted] got $20 million in [expletive deleted] diamonds that no one knows [expletive deleted] about. You could buy a [expletive deleted] Bentley!
Ice Cube
Oh. Well, [expletive deleted] yeah! [expletive deleted] YEAH!

For those that speak English, once you take the obscenities (just about every third word) out of the first act of Ice Cube's All About the Benjamins, you'll find a featherweight story in which a good guy (Ice Cube) goes bad and a petty thieving bad guy (Mike Epps) wins the lottery, courtesy of his girlfriend Gina's (Eva Mendes) numbers and a good luck crown. Add a bunch of car chases, a lot of shooting, some torture involving a halo device and a sting operation at a dog track and you've got one confusing story held together by street cred and little else.

Truth of the matter is we used to talk like that. The language, in and of itself, isn't offensive. There just comes a point where we've got to say enough is enough. That point comes about five or ten minutes in, after about two hundred or three hundred obscenities. Your statistics may vary.

The sad thing is that of all the rappers trying to make the jump into acting, Cube is one of the few that has shown promise. It's too bad he has to hide it behind four letter words.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Nine Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to All About the Benjamins, he would have paid . . .

Not a [expletive deleted] of a lot.

$1.00

Gangsta rap lovers only. We're too [expletive deleted] old for this [expletive deleted].

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