DON’T DO DOPE
This Su nda nce darlin g isn ’t habit-formi ng
DOPE Malcolm in the middling. Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity, sexuality, nudity, drug references, all involving teens). Now playing.
THE thing about “John Hughes meets ‘Boyz n the Hood’ ” as a log line for a movie is that, in “Dope,” these ideas don’t go together any better than a milkshake does with razor blades.
By turns whimsical and violent, “Dope” is a teen comedy about Malcolm, a nerdy straight-A student (Shameik Moore) from the hood in Inglewood, Calif. Along with two misfit pals, he finds himself with a backpack full of drugs (and a pistol) he can’t return to its owner. Instead, he’s forced to go into business and sell the stuff himself, learning a lesson that might make for a colorful personal-growth essay to submit with his Harvard application.
“Dope” was a huge success at the Sundance Film Festival, which is to say that an audience whiter than a Kennebunkport country club believed it spoke to them about the black experience. But as a comedy, the film isn’t especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la “Go,” it’s raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere. Whenever a serious plot hurdle pops up, it just disappears: Malcolm brings the stash into school, setting off both the metal detector and the drug-sniffing dog, but the security guard simply lets him go without searching him.
The love story is even more difficult to believe, with the streetwise girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz) of a drug dealer (A$AP Rocky) inexplicably showing an interest in Malcolm. Among the many bizarrely discordant moments are a romantic scene with her and Malcolm cutely discussing the prom, just after they were nearly killed in a wild shootout at a club that no one considers remarkable enough to even mention.
Mixed in among the scary gangsters and the kid who gets killed ordering a meal at a fast-food joint are jokes about Coachella, “Boys Don’t Cry,” ancestry. com and the meaning of the metaphor “slippery slope.” Dangerous dudes take time out to discuss President Obama’s drone policy. This movie’s a great big mess of “Huh?”
Give “Dope” points for youthful energy, and for Moore’s winning performance in the lead — he comes across as canny, nimble, alert and skilled at making things up as he goes along. If only that were true of the movie as well.