Waist Deep

The lengths to which a parent will go to save a child can be gut-wrenching stuff, but Waist Deep rarely hits you in the pit of your stomach. Blame it on the lame screenplay, which unwisely (and badly) gravitates more toward the crime-spree elements of Bonnie and Clyde than the fierce parental instincts of, say, Kramer vs. Kramer or Lorenzo's Oil. Waist Deep recounts the desperate acts of a South Central ex-con named "O2" to rescue his young son who has been kidnapped by a ruthless gang leader in a carjacking, but the film is seldom involving on any emotional level. Director Curtis-Hall uses a cinema vérité style that relies heavily on close-ups in an apparent attempt to convey the sense of urgency in O2's situation, which is further complicated by his status as a former criminal with two strikes against him. Curtis-Hall should have concentrated, however, less on such stylistic choices and more on the movie's core, which is all about the lengths a father will go to ensure the safety of his own flesh and blood. There's little transition between O2's professed determination to avoid further criminal activity for the sake of his son and his rather abrupt decision to break the law left and right in order to keep his boy alive. That critical shortcoming is, in part, attributable to Gibson's performance as O2, which is well-meaning but falls way short of drawing you into his character's pain. As the hooker with a heart of a metal that's something less precious than gold, Good is appropriately sexy, though her character makes little sense most of the time. Her relationship with O2 is borne of chance and necessity, but ultimately the role doesn't amount to much more than eye candy. There's some in-your-face (and wholly unnecessary) violence in this B-movie that may wrench your gut in an all-too-different manner; in one scene, one of the film's resident bad guys cuts off the hand of an offending minion and then proceeds to slap the bleeding man with his own severed appendage. In light of such sensationalism, the efforts of Waist Deep to make some meaningful social commentary about street gangs and the vicious circle in which African-American men often find themselves seem like an afterthought, rather than anything remotely sincere. In that respect, Waist Deep is way over its head.