Snoop Dogg’s public persona broadcasts laid-back cool. But in Bones (2001), Ernest Dickerson’s return to the horror genre after the very good Tales from the Crypt spinoff Demon Knight (1995), he almost exclusively seethes. He plays Jimmy Bones, a numbers runner slash local hero with a yen for handing out wads of cash to people on the street like it was candy. Bones, we’ll see in a flashback, was murdered in 1979 by a corrupt cop (Michael T. Weiss) and a drug pusher (Ricky Harris) who see his influence and his efforts to protect his most vulnerable neighbors from exploitative outside forces as unbearably threatening to their respective rises in power. Bones’ switchblade-cut body is buried in the basement of his brownstone, which will sit, even as closeby properties are unceremoniously demolished, untouched.
Bones’ spirit is revived when a gaggle of locals in their early 20s, led by Patrick (Khalil Kain), sets its sights on turning the brownstone into a nightclub. The reasons are no deeper than they want to, and the property was so cheap that it can make you overlook things like bloody fingernail marks outside the front door and ripped-out teeth flung onto mounds of dust. But the renovation efforts from this group of kids we find ourselves indifferent to prove better at awakening Bones’ dormant spirit than long-term business. Once enough energy has been restored to his remains, he’s walking the streets again, stylish in long leathers and an elegant yaki weave. When the club’s doors do finally open, the crowd that congregates scatters quickly, rightfully repelled by the maggots that start showering from the ceiling before the first night’s end.
Bones isn’t thinking about anything else besides getting revenge on everybody he sees as responsible for his early, brutal death. (Besides aesthetically echoing the blaxploitation films of the 1970s — something it further underpins by casting the genre’s unequivocal queen, Pam Grier, in a prominent role — Bones additionally harkens back to that earlier era with a supernatural-vengeance narrative similar to 1974’s Sugar Hill and 1976’s J.D.’s Revenge.) It’s a solid premise bolstered by some nifty practical effects: walls engorged with the moaning souls of the eternally damned, decapitated heads that talk back and are carried around like unruly purses. But things are ruptured by how long it takes for its eponymous character to enact his revenge — and his quick, suspenseless methods of murder — and Snoop Dogg’s performance in general.
Pam Grier and Snoop Dogg in Bones.
Bones’ rage ought to be as potent as the cool he emits. But Snoop Dogg, whose relationship to acting is obviously more casual than the ones he’s forged with music and entrepreneurship, only has the cool locked in. The character’s fury always feels more nominal than truly vivid, and it voids some of the film’s fun and sense of stakes. It also makes the character’s behavior feel more contradictory than it probably means to.
We don’t doubt that the version of the man we meet in the film’s approximation of the late-1970s wouldn’t hesitate before getting revenge on the people who’ve wronged him. But it doesn’t feel right that a figure screenwriters Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe go to great lengths to paint as exceptionally benevolent in life would be so cavalierly violent around those who haven’t done anything — or, that is, haven’t done anything that wrong — to warrant his wrath in addition to those who truly do. One’s moral compass is certainly susceptible to contorting after a couple of decades doing nothing else besides stewing in anger. But Simon and Metcalfe, in addition to Snoop Dogg’s insouciant performance, make the character seem more confusing than persuasively inconsistent in the way humans tend to be.
Casting a musician in the lead part of a movie incites the kind of skepticism that’s only natural when faced with something there’s no mistaking as stuntish. The musician is thus cursed from the outset to prove themselves as more than a dilettante. Snoop Dogg’s ingrained nonchalance makes you long for an actor who could have better translated his ultimately poignant character’s rancor. He only accentuates where the film falls short. A good revenge movie can be as emotionally satisfying as unspeakably sad, dreary with the knowledge that a plan’s successful execution still can’t resurrect the old stolen life so strongly pined for. But in a muddied one like Bones, you pine for the movie that could have been.
Peterson Reviews 