Not Quite Gangsta

Allison (Anne Hathaway) is a poor little rich girl, surrounded by poor little rich girl- and boy- friends. Like so many people, they’ve adopted the looks, style and mannerisms of hip hop culture. They want to look tough… and instead, they just look like Ali G. Only dumber and less coherent.

The surface nature of their image – just a phase before they hit the Ivy League, marry old money and become investment bankers – is shown up for the façade it is when Allison, boyfriend Toy (Mike Vogel) and a couple of friends (including Third Rock’s Joseph Gordon Levitt as an incomprehensible and hilarious Ali G / Jamiroquai hybrid) leave their cosy luxury homes and head to East LA.

Toby’s cajones-impaired status is rapidly revealed when he attempts to secure some illicit powders of the recreational kind from Latino gangster Hector (Freddy Rodriguez). With a gun at his head and his bladder emptying in his pants, Toby falls apart – but Allison is intrigued and returns with the girls the following night. And while this taste of true gangsta life is arousing at first, it all goes predictably pear-shaped.

Hathaway is a charming lead but, like her character, is completely out of her depth here. Her nihilism – as artificial as it’s meant to be – never sits well with her wholesome features. A scene where she almost literally makes love to the camera of a kid filming their fake gang lifestyle has a certain appeal – she’s foxy, she removes clothing – but ends up disturbing. Frankly, it’s like watching your sister getting, ahem, jiggy with it.

There’s a hint of something good here, and the frankness is admirable, occasionally coming over like a Larry Clark movie for the multiplex-goer. But it’s mostly lazy and badly thought through.

It’s the kind of film that gives Hector a grand speech about how gangsta culture is not just the clichés Allison’s seen, that he’s not just about hustling drugs… and then spends the rest of the film building him into the ultimate drug-hustling gangsta stereotype.