At the Movies: 'Never Die Alone'

By Christy Lemire
AP Entertainment Writer

"Never Die Alone," a Fox Searchlight release, is rated R for strong violence, drug use, sexuality and language. Running time: 88 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

Actually, this is exactly like a rap video or a Quentin Tarantino movie — or at least the most gratuitous, misogynistic aspects of them.

And yes, that's the whole point of the genre: "Never Die Alone" is based on the book of the same name by Donald Goines, the writer of black pulp fiction who was shot to death in 1974.

Its hero — and the audience cheered for him as a hero at a recent screening — is a drug dealer named King David (played by rapper DMX) who's already dead when the film begins.

Through self-aggrandizing audiotapes David made before his death, we learn that he enjoyed providing his girlfriends with mounds of cocaine, then got cranky when they became addicted, and decided to teach them a lesson by secretly turning them on to heroin. Once they became full-blown junkies, he either beat them in disgust, used them for sex or forced them to work as dealers.

Though it would still be horrifying to watch, this would be less problematic from a storytelling perspective if David were more fully developed.

Director Ernest Dickerson, working from James Gibson's script, bounces back and forth between flashbacks, which strips the film of substance and undermines its narrative momentum. What's left is a litany of King David's bad deeds: a highlight (or lowlight) reel as told from his coffin.

He's going to be an unsympathetic figure — that's a given. But it's possible to create this kind of questionable character with enough complexity that viewers inadvertently root for him to succeed. Tony Soprano is a good example, or Vic Mackey from "The Shield" — volatile, unscrupulous guys who have some semblance of a heart beating beneath the pit-bull exterior.

The closest David comes is pretty implausible: After he's been stabbed outside a bar by Mike (Michael Ealy), a hit man who has long sought vengeance against him, David gets a ride to the hospital from Paul (David Arquette), the aforementioned wannabe writer.

David doesn't even know the guy, but uses his final breaths to leave him everything: his gold watch, his diamond pinkie ring, and his pimped-out ride with a quarter-million dollars stashed in the trunk.

More valuable to Paul, though, are the tapes he finds in the glove compartment containing David's life story: "The Autobiography of a King," the deceased drug dealer called them.

It's all too facile: Paul's looking for a juicy story to tell, and one drops right into his lap. He's a caricature of the old-school writer — hard-drinking and chain-smoking while pounding away on his manual typewriter.

Ealy, who previously co-starred in the "Barbershop" movies, seems like he's trying to infuse his character with some depth. But DMX may want to stick to recording studios instead of movie sets; all he does is scowl.

Then again, in rap videos, that's what passes for acting.