Waist Deep: Critic Reviews

Curtis Hall keeps slipping in surprising social and emotional flavorings rarely found in [this] genre.

Waist Deep is unapologetically a B movie, its narrative premise placed carefully on the borderline between the wildly implausible and the completely absurd.

No, it's not a great movie. It is, however, an interesting one, a combination of exploitative hood flick and meditation on trust and love -- thug love, romantic love and, most important, parent-child love.

A cynical excuse for the writer and director (and talented actor) Vondie Curtis-Hall to sock some money away for the kids' college tuition.

For its ever shifting attitudes toward men, women, and murder, Waist Deep is one of the sloppiest movies ever to reach the screen.

Nothing in this story is remotely realistic, and the target audience for urban dramas -- teenage boys -- won't know what to make of its mushy romantic center.

Everyone connected with this gangsta opus was probably trying to make a crowd-pleaser. However, you wind up wondering what kind of crowds they were trying to please.

By teasing us with potential meaning only to embrace wanton gunplay, Waist Deep betrays thinking members in the audience.

Even with the movie's multiple personas, its message -- that salvation sometimes doesn't arrive in the expected form, and that escaping isn't the same thing as running away -- is delivered loud and clear.

What really sinks Waist Deep is the fact that the action scenes and car chases are poorly handled, and that the climactic confrontation takes place far too early, leaving the characters to lumber around for 20 minutes in a dull daze.

If the daydreams of a teenager playing Grand Theft Auto could be made into a music video, the result would resemble Waist Deep.

If you're looking for gunning gangsta action on a hot summer night, Waist Deep is an effective-enough story of urban outlaws in love and on the run. It's sweet, sweaty stuff, for a while at least.

A mean and depressing B-movie in which there's no one to root for or even care about.

For all helmer Vondie Curtis Hall's aspirations to grittiness, his script (co-written by Darin Scott) is mired in a violent fantasy L.A. where the stereotypes fly almost as fast as the bullets.

All of the familiar urban stereotypes and cliches are out in force.

Waist Deep is a hip, hard genre picture that begins well, but quickly gets in over its head.

Director Vondie Curtis Hall gives this virtually nonstop crime actioner, set against the mean streets of Los Angeles, pleasing noirish touches along with larger-than-life-size characters.

It seemed impossible that Vondie Curtis Hall could direct a movie that's as bad as Glitter, but he has: Waist Deep. And Mariah Carey is nowhere in sight.

Would most likely have made for a decent late-night Cinemax staple, but its stabs at higher significance only bring on the giggles.

A waste of time!

I saw Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde is a major American movie. Waist Deep, sir, is no Bonnie and Clyde.

...strangely uninvolving...