WAIST DEEP

Waist Deep may not be believable from start to finish, but it's a slickly produced and reasonably entertaining entry in the "gangsta noir" genre that includes such previous films as Dead Presidents, Set it Off, and Never Die Alone. In his first leading role since playing a somewhat similar character in 2001's Baby Boy, Tyrese Gibson plays O2 (short for "Oxygen"), who's just emerged from six years in prison and is looking to go legit all the way. That's when his car gets stolen – with his young son Junior still in the backseat – and O2 retaliates by inciting a gang war on the streets of Los Angeles. He recruits his unpredictable pot-head brother Lucky (Larenz Tate) and the reluctant assistance of a hot hustler named Coco (Meagan Good) in a bank-robbing scheme to pay the $100,000 ransom that a brutal machete-wielding thug named Meat (played by rapper The Game) has demanded for Junior's safe return. Director Vondie Curtis-Hall (whose son, H. Hunter Hall, plays Junior) keeps the twisting plot moving at a pulse-quickening pace, and the movie looks great thanks to Shane Hurlbut's widescreen cinematography, but the build-up of improbable (or just plain ludicrous) events becomes a little too much to handle as Waist Deep gets waist deep in its own predictability. On the plus side, Gibson and Good make an appealing action couple, and despite its overly maudlin conclusion, the movie's got some emotional depth that comes as a pleasant surprise amidst its otherwise forgivable shortcomings. --Jeff Shannon