In short, Snipes is a gangsta take on one of the staple plots of Hollywood crime drama: a person, having witnessed a crime, must now exonerate her/himself of guilt while simultaneously using her or his cunning to evade pursuers and catch the real criminals. It’s hard to swing a dead cat through Blockbuster’s Drama section without hitting a dozen of these flics. You’ve seen it dozens of times. The production team behind Snipes is well aware of this, but they are willing to bet (and bet smartly they do) that you’ve never seen this plot superimposed on the world of hip-hop music.
Snipes stars Nelly as Clarence Eubanks, a.k.a. Prolifik, a Philadelphia hoodlum-rapper with a huge hit single and an album supposedly dropping in the near future. His boss is Bobby Starr (Dean Winters), the unnecessarily foul-mouthed manager of Ill-Will Records. Starr is pissed off at his guaranteed paycheck, because Prolifik’s forthcoming release “Revenge of the Intellect” has been neither forth nor coming with no progress to report.
Enter the central character of the film. Erik Triggs (Sam Jones III) a.k.a. “Snipes” is an unscholastically-motivated high school senior in charge of putting up posters to hype Prolifik’s new joint. He gets his nickname from his ability to snipe, that it, take down posters advertising other groups and putting up Prolifik’s ads in their places. One night, while trying to hook his friend Malik (Mpho Koaho) up with some free studio time on the Ill-Will boards, the boys come upon a few dead bodies. Not only that, but the nearly complete, magnetic gold master tapes from Prolifik’s album are missing from the studio.
Starr comes after the boys, figuring that these young lads could pull of a complicated heist and homicide. As Snipes runs from Bobby Starr and his goons, he enlists the help of Cheryl (Zoe Saldana), a friend and fellow employee of Ill-Will. She is beautiful but mysterious, and adds yet another piece to the puzzle that slowly reveals itself, building to a few major scenes of exposition and revelation leading up to a bullet-ridden climax.
Sam Jones III gets the most screen time and sort of deserves it. He exudes the awkwardness and bravado of the modern urban adolescent with ease and does not overact the scenes where he has to be a badass. The role of Prolifik was tailor-made for Nelly, and he plays it to perfection. The shrewd rapper is entirely within his range, and he adds much needed charisma and star power to an otherwise unstellar cast. Disappointingly, Dean Winters’ asshole record exec is nothing more than a caricature and it is impossible not to laugh at everything he says during most of the film.
On a visual level, Snipes is unimpressive. Director Rich Murray must love manipulating his tripod mount because there are dozens of unnecessarily canted angles throughout the film. After the first few times, the tilted shot loses most of it meaning or significance. Murray’s background in music videos lends itself to superfluous movement of the camera, but it is a distraction at best.
As it turns out, Snipes is pretty entertaining. There are a few inspired moments of violence and comedy (sometimes together), and, to be honest, much of the film is unintentionally comic. Meth & Red’s How High notwithstanding, there hasn’t been a halfway decent film with a hip-hop ethic since Black and White, so if you enjoy the genre, this might be worth your time.
Grade: C