Review of Dope (2015) by Campbell P — 28 Jun 2015

Dope is a movie that you can kind of call a coming of age film, action film, adventure film, social issue film, it's a lot of things and that's necessarily a bad thing. It actually helps it a lot.

It covers a lot of different genres while still trying to go across one main point and that is it doesn't matter where you come from, you can still achieve what you want as long as you work hard for it and man does Malcolm work hard for it.

The story follows Malcolm and his friends Diggy and Jib who are 90's hip hop geeks and are super smart kids who all want to go to college and be successful in life. When Malcolm gets mixed in with the wrong crowd, he somehow ends up with a ton of dope in his backpack and is desperately trying to find a way to get rid of it without putting him and his friends at risk.

One thing to really applaud is that the leads aren't typical nerd characters in movies. They don't wear glasses and wear typical nerd clothing and don't do especially typical nerdy stuff. They act like nerds that you see at school, they obsess over college, they dress from a different era, and are socially awkward in a realistic way.

Shameik Moore was an incredible lead character, which hopefully means more roles for this kid because he brought together a fantastic memorable character. Tony Revolori has proven that with his performances in here and last year's Grand Budapest Hotel that he is a great actor too.

All the lead characters were really well acted and created some realistic characters and not a basic cartoony nerd or villain. I love how this movie also manages to be suspenseful and adventurous with the whole chase for the drugs and how to get rid of them scenario.

It made for really good entertaining scenes that were really nicely edited too. The way that they finally figure out how to get rid of the drugs is actually pretty clever and kinda funny at the same time.

Through all this there's an emotional theme surrounding this film the whole time of whether or not he will be accepted to Harvard and if his amazing talents are threatened due to these drugs and I felt for Malcolm.

He's a good hearted kid that deserved the best for himself. There's more than one message that is thrown out there during the film, the one I mentioned before and that it's important to be yourself and to embrace it because being fake is going to get you into trouble.

The soundtrack was a lot of fun too, especially if you grew up in the 90's. If you were and into hip hop you will love this movie even more. It carried on for a bit too long I felt and I felt like there was a dead point for about 15 minutes in the film but that's my only big problem with it.

Dope, however, is a really fun film that captures growing up in high school and the dangers that you can encounter. It's really well shot, it was funny, it was adventurous, and even though it's slow at times there's never a time where you'll call a scene dull.

B+.