Image via Complex Original
When Belly, the first and only feature-length movie from music video legend Hype Williams, arrived in theaters in 1998, critics blasted it. Many rap fans, reacting in equal measure, were quick to call the movie great, arguing that critics just didn't get it. Fifteen years later, the truth about Belly isn't that it’s good or bad (it's a bit of both), but that it's really, really weird.
The plot moves through enough stories for a half-dozen screenplays. Most of the scenes bring the story to a screeching halt, like the movie's lost track of time admiring its own style in the mirror. (This makes Belly something like a John Waters movie, where the story is useful only in that it can move things from one moment of spectacle to the next.) When the movie takes the longest looks, Belly is so strange and awesome, it feels like love.
The opening robbery, shot at Peter Gatien's New York nightclub The Tunnel, is mesmerizing. The subsequent scene at Buns' (DMX) crib, with the low-angle shots of enormous pieces of art, black-and-white color palatte, and the scenes from Harmony Korine’s Gummo (a-not-so-subtle note to the reader that Belly should be treated like a cult classic, a midnight movie more than the rap GoodFellas) are just as compulsively watchable. And then there's the sex montage a few minutes later, which is ludicrous and beautiful and uncalled for and unpredictable. How is this happening? What is anything?
Belly falters when it becomes more an act of transcription than a movie. Having Nas' character narrate about the size of one character's breasts while showing the viewer those breasts is a poor choice. Showing while telling makes everyone feel stupid, including the viewer. But those errors in storytelling don’t detract from the other peaks on display, like everything involving Rico, Tyrin Turner's immaculately coiffed Omaha gangster.
On the movie's 15th anniversary, we're looking at the performances in Belly, to determine who did it right and who slept through the shoot.
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Taral Hicks as Kisha
Grade: C
Hype Williams does Taral Hicks very few favors. It's a tough performance when you've been soaked from calves to chin in baby oil, and spend most of your waking life watching your own R&B videos in a room lit exclusively with blue lights.
Hicks does the best with what she's got, but since what she's got is the nagging girlfriend, her best doesn't amount to much in the way of memorable scenes. She gets to luxuriate in the afterglow of rough sexing with DMX, and the image of her nestling into her pillows is classic. She also gets to pop Shameek in the face after catching a body slam through a glass table. Everything balances out?
Frank Vincent as Roger
Grade: B-
Frank Vincent seems to be in this movie solely because of his connection to gangster movies like GoodFellas. As a professional actor, he's one of the more natural deliverers of dialogue in all of Belly and, actually, that's not what Belly needs.
Stray thought: Was Vincent even on set for this? You practically never see his character's face. It's like they dubbed in his voice. Weird.
UPDATE: Thanks to King, I now know that Vincent was on set, but had trouble with the bald cap he was supposed to wear. (Vincent refused to cut his hair.) This makes him a little bit of a dick, and does not change his grade.
Louie Rankin as Lennox
Grade: B
Dancehall legend Louie Rankin didn't have to do much in his role as Ox except smoke blunts, watch soccer, and yell about how he's the toughest gangster in all of Queens. He does these things—especially the soccer watching and yelling—very well.
To the unaccustomed ear, his dialogue is best, too, as his patois makes everything sound uniformly intimidating and excellent. Much of the dialogue in Belly sounds like it was improvised on the fly. Rankin shouting, "Who wants to romp with bumbaclot?" while his pad gets flooded with killers, a la the ending of Scarface, must have been a good day on set.
Method Man as Shameek
Grade: B
Method Man is low-key one of the most gifted actors in all of Belly, and he has one of the more complicated roles. As Shameek, the M-E-T-H-O-D Man has to act within the story, posing as a fake gangster out of New York for Tyrin Turner's Rico. Wearing the kind of obnoxious Kangol only Sam Jackson could get away with, wanksta Shameek is pure comedy. When Shameek has to get down and dirty (shout out to the first-person shooter POV in the strip club shootout), the performance falters a little bit. Method is just more of a joker.
Vita as Kionna
Grade: B+
The bit parts in Belly are the best, especially one-time Murder Inc. member Vita's turn as the most ratchet Kionna. Prancing around a bedroom the color of cotton candy, like in that Toni Braxton video for "You're Making Me High," Kionna talks a sweet stream of shit to Kisha, saying things about how she and Buns don't fuck, she only blows him because of how young she is. It's ratchet and ribald, and she owns it.
Tyrin Turner as Rico
Grade: A
Why is he eating that banana? In one of many moments that announces Belly is more of a midnight movie than a blockbuster Scorsese picture, Tyrin Turner's Rico—the illest dude in Nebraska, apparently—steps onto the scene chomping a banana. Flecks of fruit dot his lips. His eyes are made enormous and insect-like by prescription lenses that must mean he's legally blind, like the crazy aunt your family lost to her cats. Everything Rico does is so grotesque, it must've made John Waters jealous. Bravo.
Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins as Tionne
Grade: B
You know what? T-Boz, playing Sincere's girlfriend and baby's mother, is kinda good. She makes great concerned faces, like when Kionna is expressing concern about Buns during a heart-to-heart walk or when she visits Kionna in jail (a scene that works especially well because, like most of Belly's best scenes, there's no dialogue).
Elsewhere, she doesn't sound like she's reading from a teleprompter during her moments with Nas. (This is more than you can say about Nas.) It's sweet when Sincere asks her if she loves him, and she says that of course she does. She also has great platinum-white hair.
Nas as Sincere
Grade: D
Nas, as Sincere, is that friend of yours who reads one book and now won't shut up about it, and wants to stop making illegal drug money because if it. He's just like that friend, you know the one, except he's also asleep. Acting with a kind of negative charisma, Nas couldn't sound more bored. "I got shot," he tells Tionne in the same voice you might tell a stranger, "Looks like rain today." He's not good-bad, he's just bad-bad.
DMX as Tommy "Buns" Bundy
Grade: A+
If you had to pick one actor to represent Belly, and you couldn't pick Tyrin Turner, you'd have to go with DMX. He is Belly. His voice opens the movie, soundtracking the satanic ritual of a little boy blessing his future in a bedroom in Queens. Joe Pesci's violent character in GoodFellas, Tommy DeVito, is a reference for Tommy "Buns" Bundy, but DeVito never sang in the shower with the kind of gusto Dark Man X brings. Pesci would never have pranced around his pad naked, dick swinging, like X. Even when he's calm, he nods and bounces. Physically, he's so distracting that he pulls you out of the story, makes you think about DMX the man instead of his character, but it works.
His energy is too much, one of the biggest things beyond Williams' stylistic excess that turns the movie into something weird and unpredictable, simultaneously amateurish and enormous, like a giant angry baby. DMX also has some of the best lines, and I'm not just talking about the ones where he quotes ad-libs from his music. When he's berating Sincere for wanting out of the business, he drops the gem, "Oh, because you're a homeowner now?" "Fuck a book," he tells Sincere, snarling. Fuck a movie, his performance says with all its recklessness. Nothing can contain me.