“Waist Deep” begins with an incident similar to the one that jump-started “Freedomland” earlier this year: a carjacking that includes a child accidentally left in the back seat of the car. Unlike the sweeping ambitions of “Freedomland,” however, “Waist Deep” scales down to a basic urban gangland tale.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; “Freedomland,” after all, foundered badly in its pretentious overreach. But “Waist Deep” can’t do much better, due to a messy story and an underwhelming leading man.
The kid in the back seat of the car belongs to a tattoed man named Otis, aka O2, played by Tyrese Gibson. In a pretty good scene that recalls a similar shoot-out in “Heat,” O2 chases down the carjackers on foot, firing off shots but failing to catch the kidnappers.
O2’s been out of prison for about a month, and he “borrowed” a gun from his new job as a security guard. So going to the police for help is out.
However, he does enlist the young woman (Meagan Good) who helped lure him into the trap in the first place. Yes, this sounds like an unwise strategy, but if you saw Meagan Good you’d probably throw wisdom out the window too.
Turns out the kidnapping wasn’t random; O2 has been targeted by a local crime boss (rapper The Game) who thinks O2 still has the 100 grand he stole a few years earlier. Not true, which means the frantic father must find that amount in a day and a half.
This leads to an increasingly unbelievable series of events, including a crime spree. Director Vondie Curtis Hall, a talented actor, aims for a layer of humor, or as much as he can get in a movie about a child in jeopardy. He directed a film called “Gridlock’d” a few years ago that was an offbeat and suspenseful inner-city number.
That movie, however, had the virtue of two charismatic actors, Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth. “Waist Deep” is on the beefy shoulders of Tyrese Gibson, late of “Annapolis” and “Four Brothers.” And he just doesn’t have the kind of commanding presence that might have made this film come to life.
Larenz Tate (“Crash”) adds some hops as O2’s hopelessly unreliable kin, but he’s not in the movie enough to do what Robert De Niro did for “Mean Streets.” As the baddie, The Game is believably repellant.
It all works out in a way that had a preview audience chuckling at the screen, but they weren’t the kind of laughs the film was going for elsewhere. That’s probably not a good sign.
Tyrese Gibson stars in “Waist Deep.”
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