Hustle & Flow

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Calvin T Top tier movie...made sure I bought it Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 05/25/25 Full Review Paul K For any aspiring actors that would like a free lesson, this is a good one to study. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 05/19/25 Full Review Matty D Terrance Howard is a terrible actor. How does this guy get work still? Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 04/29/25 Full Review The B Oh man… just perfect. A masterpiece. Everything felt so real in this film and the acting was incredible. It was just very believable and Terrence Howard absolutely bodied the role of Djay. Taraji P. Henson was just great in it as well. Best hip-hop film ever. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 07/12/24 Full Review Dominique W Nearly flawless. The south has something to say. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/21/23 Full Review Taylor L Between 2000 and 2010, it seemed like Anthony Anderson was a supporting character in half the comedies in theatres and on daytime TV. Then he slipped into the game show circuit, never to be heard from again ... except for his 11 Primetime Emmy nominations for Black-ish. Still weird that he's totally absent from film though. A cutting look at the American Dream and the few outlets that African-American men feel serve as a potential lifestyle - drugs, pimping, and rap - that gradually expands to incorporate a whole cast of characters that are caught up in the pressure of a working class existent that squeezes them dry. It's a place where dreams are treated as the opium of the masses, a means of keeping people placated so they don't recognize their own self-repression... right up until our main character pistol whips someone famous, rides that infamy to stardom, and virtually everything works out for him, sort of negating the ideas the film drops on you. Terrence Howard's Dee-Jay is no saint, he is supposed to be an empathetic loser but he's a violent pimp and a drug dealer with few redeeming qualities; somehow all the women in his life have Stockholm Syndrome and treat him like a brow-beaten provider when he's the root of all their problems. There's not really any clever dialogue built up around how Dee-Jay finds success despite, or perhaps because, he's a terrible person, it's just treated as a rags to riches story struggling against adversity. It plays heavily into stereotypes and only serves to reinforce the simplistic appeal of exploitation films of prior years. Ignoring the cardinal direction that the film goes in, Hustle & Flow is actually a really good depiction of the creative process. The characters really feel like they have this chip on their shoulder as they meet in a back room studio with walls covered in cupholders as makeshift soundproofing. The music itself (including the main single by Three 6 Mafia, which won the Oscar for Best Original Song) is catchy, and the film dives deep into its Memphis identity. The story ends up being surprisingly cutting, particularly the back-and-forth between Dee-Jay and Ludacris's Skinny Black that builds up this connection, giving glimpses of a name up in lights before cutting the legs right out from under you. If the movie ends about there, Hustle & Flow is a tough look at personal identity and misplaced hope, sort of a Death of a Salesman for a hip hop era. But when everything comes back around in Dee-Jay's favor, all that ends up pretty much pointless. Be a pimp, make a demo, punch a guy, get famous. Terrence Howard got a Best Actor Oscar nom out of this movie, though apparently he's still having a tough time getting people to accept Terryology and its central belief that 1x1=2. But as Dee-Jay reminded us, "everybody's gotta have a dream". (2.5/5) Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/10/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Hustle & Flow

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