Waist Deep tells the story of O2 (Tyrese Gibson), a security guard who gets carjacked on a gridlocked south Los Angeles street but luckily carries a gun because it's part of his parole.
Wait.
Yes ... checking my notes again ... says right here ... "part of his parole." That make sense to you? He carries a gun, he explains, because that guard job is part of a program for rehabilitating ex-cons.
Plus, you get a gun, I guess.
A gun he places in the glove compartment of the car in which he picks up his son - who (sitting in the front seat and not wearing his seatbelt, tsk tsk) promptly reaches for it and gets an earful about playing with guns because he's not an ex-con and a security guard and therefore not eligible. This from a father who, minutes earlier, was thrilled his son got into a brawl and beat a kid senseless.
O2 is not a good father. We could discuss the lack of role models in action movies targeted at black audiences (though I doubt anyone ever wondered if Chuck Norris attended parent-teacher conferences); or how the violent crime this film romanticizes is on the rise again; or we could talk about the way director Vondie Curtis-Hall (the guy responsible for Mariah Carey's Glitter) makes a good-looking movie but chops up dramatic scenes (a shot of an eyeball, then lips, then teeth) until the picture resembles a television commercial for hay-fever medication.
But Waist Deep is so deep in improbabilities, your patience for the piled-on coincidences stretched so thin, I found myself pondering the title. Does it refer to the mounting problems of O2, forced to cough up $100,000 in hours or something unexplained yet likely involving guns will happen to his son? Or was it tacked on at the end of production, when focus groups recognized here was a flick so thoroughly stuck in a muck of incomprehension, it soaks in it?
O2 is set up by a prostitute (Meagan Good, quite good, actually). She endangers his son. Naturally, once the shock passes (in five minutes, tops) he goes to bed with her. "There's so many things I could be doing to find my son," O2 tells the prostitute he's sleeping with who arranged his son's kidnapping. You would think he was rushing to pick up dry-cleaning before the place closes - there is zero urgency.
So naturally they rob banks to get money; naturally they know how to; naturally he can disarm a security system with a screwdriver; naturally he clips the green wire; naturally they hide out in a home when a movie theater would have worked, too. And naturally, in a movie where gangstas cruise in slow motion, the smoke of their blunts wafting with the glamour of many rap videos, there's a social message.
"Save our streets," we hear.
Over and over, again.
Waist Deep, indeed.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.
First Published June 23, 2006, 9:45 a.m.