The 2009 Val Kilmer/50 Cent Vehicle Streets of Blood wants to be Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Instead, it's just bad

50 Cent has appeared in so many interchangeable direct-to-streaming movies that it can be easy to forget that at the very beginning of his career, when he was arguably the hottest, most successful rapper in the world, the G-Unit mogul starred in a prestige picture based on his own dramatic life and career.

2005’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was supposed to be 50 Cent’s 8 Mile, a classy biopic rooted in the rich mythology of Curtis Jackson’s life as a drug dealer turned superstar rapper. Director Jim Sheridan famously told 50 Cent not to take acting lessons. He assured the moonlighting MC that if he gave a bad performance in what would have been his star-making vehicle, then it would be his fault.

Sheridan fucked up big time, unfortunately. The oft-shot Hip Hop superstar delivering a low-energy, monotone, mush-mouthed performance with none of the humor, charisma, or flash that distinguishes him as a rapper.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ wasn’t the rapper’s only shot at cinematic respectability. A year after critics and audiences forcefully rejected 50 Cent’s starring debut he played a supporting role in Rocky and Raging Bull producer Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave, a dour message movie about PTSD that’s like The Best Years of Our Lives for idiots.

50 at least gave a markedly different kind of terrible performance. In Get Rich or Die Tryin’, he’s so dull it sometimes seems like he’s fallen asleep, but in Home of the Brave, he overacts shamelessly as a live-wire lunatic.

Incidentally, I was looking up Get Rich or Die Tryin’ on Wikipedia and came across this fascinating quote: “In retrospect, director Jim Sheridan, said: “Get Rich came out the wrong way. I thought, 'I can do this.' I'm there directing 50 Cent, and he's looking blank, and I'm thinking, 'this is great. The American audience will get this. When they look at John Wayne and his face is blank, they know exactly what he's thinking. So I'm thinking, 'this is like John Wayne.' I was wrong.“ He also added: "When you look at 50 Cent and his face is blank you go 'what ... is he thinking?' He's not John Wayne. My empathy tripped me up. I got it, so I assumed the audience would. They didn’t."

It’s fascinating to me that Sheridan understood that 50 was a blank onscreen but thought that worked in his favor. I suspect a racial element was at play as well, where white audiences looked at John Wayne’s glower and projected all manner of positive attributes onto him but saw 50 Cent’s inability to emote as a shortcoming. To audiences, Wayne was iconic; 50 was a cipher, a blank, a charisma vacuum onscreen despite being wildly charismatic on wax.

The negative responses to Get Rich or Die Tryin and Home of the Brave and a total lack of acting talent did not keep 50 from aggressively pursuing an Academy Award. He wrote himself an Oscar-friendly role as a college football player dying of cancer in 2011’s All Things Fall Apart yet won only voluminous mocking, unintentional laughter.

50 Cent was still a neophyte film actor when he made 2009’s Streets of Blood. He followed up Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and Home of the Brave with a supporting role in the widely reviled Al Pacino/Robert De Niro movie Righteous Kill.

The rapper’s movies were all stinkers, yet they nevertheless had elements of prestige. That holds true of the movie 50, made after Rigtheous Kill, the 2009 direct-to-video thriller Streets of Blood.

The film was executive produced by Irwin Winkler and directed by his son Charlie. It costarred Val Kilmer and Sharon Stone, another former A-lister who had slid far down the ladder of success, in addition to Michael Biehn.

Streets of Blood marked the first of three collaborations between 50 Cent and Kilmer. These persistent opportunists weren’t about to let their complete lack of chemistry prevent them from working together repeatedly.

Streets of Blood is part of a post-Katrina boom in filming in New Orleans spurred by generous tax credits. I realized that the film shared much with Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, most notably Kilmer and a colorful New Orleans setting. I did not realize that the movies were released the same year and were both produced by Randall Emmett, who accidentally helped produce several good movies: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Irishman, and Mississipi Grind.

The film’s framing device finds post-Katrina New Orleans cops being interviewed by a tough police psychologist played by Sharon Stone. When Streets of Blood was released direct to video seventeen long years ago, the Basic Instinct star was aging out of sexpot roles and into playing stern authority figures. This finds Stone in a transitional moment in her career, playing a stern authority figure who isn’t about to be bullied or intimidated by the cops she works with while still being extremely attractive.

Unfortunately, Stone’s performance is notable primarily for her shaky N’Awlins accent. The film’s dialect coach should have been fired, then blacklisted from the industry, then murdered.

Kilmer, who replaced a slumming Robert De Niro, boasts a shaky New Orleans accent that comes and goes while, while in an act of mercy towards the audience and rapper, 50 Cent plays a former Chicagoan who recently moved from the Windy City to the Big Easy.

Needless to say, 50 does not have a Chicago accent either, but I’m grateful that we were spared the indignity of 50 attempting a New Orleans accent.

The movie opens in the aftermath of Katrina. Nature’s fury has resulted in a Wild West, where shop owners take up arms to keep looters from robbing their businesses and the cops are also criminals.

The film opens with Kilmer’s Detective Andy Devereaux being reunited with a former partner. Unfortunately for them both, he’s a bloated, withered corpse.

Detective Devereaux’s old man was a legendary lawman who died in the line of fire, giving him the requisite daddy issues and need to prove himself.

There are no good cops in Streets of Blood. It’s not a matter of good cops and bad cops so much as bad cops, even worse cops, and cops who could not be more corrupt.

Kilmer and 50 Cent’s moderately dirty cops are eclipsed in corruption and evil by their even more depraved colleagues Barney (50’s Home of the Brave costar Brian Presley) and Pepe (Jose Pablo Cantillo).

These crazed coppers commit a major faux pas when they kill a drug dealer who turns out to be an undercover agent. Barney and Pepe kill so many people so indiscriminately that the law of averages dictates that at least some of their victims would be working covertly for law enforcement.

Streets of Blood is an exceedingly dark film in myriad ways. Corruption and brutality are rampant. Dirty cops kill and rape and steal. They’re criminals protected by the badge and a code of silence.

Visually, Streets of Blood is so poorly lit that it’s difficult to tell what’s happening. The film is also so muddled, confused, and borderline incoherent that you don’t feel like you’re losing much.

50’s Midwestern lawman is introduced as a family man but he turns out to be nearly as corrupt as his more solitary peers.

Streets of Blood has no interest in the devastation wrought by Katrina as anything beyond a cynical plot point. It’s a sordid B-movie devoid of empathy, compassion or understatement.

It’s been well over a decade since I’ve written about a 50 Cent movie. I was weirdly relieved to discover that he’s still an abysmal actor with a wooden presence and stilted delivery.

Kilmer and 50 Cent apparently became good friends working on the movie, but you would never know it from their faltering connection.

As with the lesser later films of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, many of which were produced by Randall Emmett, Kilmer sinks to the level of his subpar material. He’s a dirty cop like every other in a macho hellscape where bad people get away with doing terrible things because the universe is insane and unfair.

Streets of Blood feels like an Asylum knockoff of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans despite the presence of three huge celebrities in lead roles.

This underachieving exploitation movie wants desperately to be Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Instead, it’s just bad.