Director: Malcolm D. Lee
Starring: Bow Wow, Chi McBride, Wesley Jonathan, Charlie Murphy, Wayne Brady, Nick Cannon
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some crude humor
Release Date: September 23, 2005
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Running Time: 112 mins.
After seeing “Roll Bounce,” I am convinced that creating more movies like this one could be a real strategy for winning the War on Terror, and that’s because Malcolm D. Lee’s nostalgic tribute to the roller-skating days of the mid-to-late 1970’s solidifies my wild belief that world peace can be achieved if all wars were settled by skate-breakdancing.
I’ve given this a lot of thought.
Since “Roll Bounce,” I’ve been asking myself, ‘why hasn’t Hollywood been making movies like this bi-weekly since World War II?’ With so much garbage towed into cinemas each summer, wouldn’t everyone agree that each film would be more enjoyable if every character who mattered wore rollerskates for the duration of the film?
Lee’s picture achieves near pitch-perfection with the (supposed) look and feel of what it would be like living in the U.S. during the 1970’s. The hair is right, the jeans are right, and the soundtrack still contains the pops and fizzles of our LP records of late. If this film weren’t playing at your local cineplex right now, you might swear it was made immediately proceeding the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. (And everyone intelligent already knows that is when America first discovered that rollerskates + breakdancing = global unity).
So the story goes like this: Xavier “X” Smith (Bow Wow) is an African American teen growing up in the south-side of Chicago who wants to spend every waking moment of his summer on eight wheels with his friends at The Garden, their local skating rink, which closes it’s doors for good in the first five minutes of the film.
Allegedly, the Garden is the birthplace of this style of roller-skating as we know it - quite similar to how the Garden of Eden is allegedly the birthplace of mankind as we know it. When the rink shuts down (God raised the Garden’s lease), X and his friends are expelled from paradise and are forced into a cruel outside world that recognizes them as poor, uneducated and black. That is to say, X now feels shame, fear, nakedness, and birth pains. He now has to take the bus to the north-side to skate, and he is taunted by the majority of Caucasian skaters who reside there.
So, let’s quickly recap: the Garden = the Garden of Eden. The rich whites who make the kids feel like subpar human beings = original sin times “x” (“x” being “X”). Got it? I sure hope so.
Quite unsurprisingly, X doesn’t seem to address any of these complex matters during the film. After all, he lives his life on eight motherfucking wheels, man. X is so busy skating on the north-side and feeling out of place there that he completely fails to recognize that his heartbroken father (Chi McBride) has not gotten over the death of X’s mother. To make matters worse, X’s overqualified dad can’t get hired as anything but a janitor, despite his jet-engineering background.
The drama is well-included, but ultimately incidental to the story; there’s a badass disco-pop skate clique on the loose that is led by a man so flavorful they named Sweetness (Wesley Jonathan), and Sweetness refuses to give props to the street-wise skills of X’s crew.
What ensues is the finest twenty minutes of blood-on-the-walls battle footage since the first twenty minutes of “Saving Private Ryan.” Forget that “Roll Bounce” doesn’t have the explosions and the vulgarity that most of today’s movie audiences expect; “Roll Bounce” has style, comedy, Nick Cannon and a motherfucking roller-skate war. Are you not entertained!?
“Roll Bounce” never needed anything else to become one of the greatest skating movies of our (or any) time - it coasts along just fine for 112 minutes by painting a picture of the sheer joy of being a kid. That means getting out of the house as soon as you can put your clothes on, skating around town, getting that first kiss, racing home before 6 o’clock and jamming to some funky shit on your oversized radio-headphones that will likely give you cancer in thirty-five year’s time since you repeatedly fell asleep while wearing them to bed. Melanoma aside, Bow Wow plays X with a surprising degree of sensibility – retaining that joy of being a young, free teen – but also understanding what it takes to be a real man in the real world. And while X and his gang don’t necessarily have the skills to take on Sweetness and the home-team favorites, it’s these kids’ love for world peace that keeps them skating, even as they face a sudden-death match-up in the final act of the film. Wesley Jonathan’s hilariously deadpan Sweetness is obviously too much for X to handle, but X keeps on fighting for the title of being the rink’s prima donna. Because his mom always encouraged him to skate. When she was still alive.
See what I told you? This movie has a heart of fucking gold, as well as a detailed layout of the complete strategy to win the war on terror which I failed to describe in my review above. Awesome!
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michael alahouzos
2005
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