Top Five barely scrapes the bottom ten
Starring Chris Rock and Rosario Dawson. Rated 18A. Now playing.
I’ve been quick to forgive Chris Rock when his humour crosses the taste line, or when his ambitions exceed his reach, as with his self-admittedly lame earlier efforts at directing, Head of State and I Think I Love My Wife. So I was truly looking forward to Top Five, touted as his first “real” venture as an auteur. Late in the film, he tells a live audience to lower its expectation, and I just wish he had said that sooner.
The new film has him playing Andre Allen, a former standup who’s hit paydirt in a trilogy of crass comedies, as a gun-wielding guy in an ursine suit, called Hammy the Bear. Now, like Michael Keaton’s Birdman character, he wants to skip the sequels and get serious. Too bad virtually nothing about Top Five was thought through with anything resembling wit or clarity, and the laughs come only from the easygoing improv he pulls out of pals like Kevin Hart, Cedric the Entertainer, SNL’s Leslie Jones, and pre-accident Tracy Morgan.
The title, by the way, refers to their ongoing banter about all-time favourite rappers, and there’s no attempt to connect that with the film’s other themes—let alone its year-end status. So, aside from the black-culture references, how is this different from Adam Sandler’s throwaway flicks? (Yes, he shows up, too.) Well, those Happy Gilmore productions don’t purport to be about anything. Here, the perpetually frustrated protagonist is saddled with an upcoming marriage to a reality TV star (Gabrielle Union, with whom Rock evidences zero chemistry) who expects to air their nuptials in prime time. And he’s agreed to do an in-depth interview with the New York Times, to promote his first “serious” effort, a feature called Uprize, about a bloody Haitian slave revolt. Rosario Dawson plays the scribe they send, and she immediately starts insulting him, so we know where that’s going right from the start.
Oddly enough, this is the third current film, along with Birdman and Tim Burton’s upcoming Big Eyes to feature an ongoing conflict between an artist and a Times writer. These films show no grasp of how criticism or editorial policies actually work, and this one depends on a pseudonymous subplot that calls into question the intelligence of the whole project. True satire is a bear, all right, and it’s not a suit you can simply step in and out of.
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