Dope tells the story of Malcolm who is a promising college student who finds himself on the wrong side of the tracks when he attends an underground party and it is at this 'party' that Malcolm unwittingly acquires a large stash of drugs which two rival drug-dealers both claim to be their property. One of the drug-dealers is in police custody, but the other dealer is at large and will stop at nothing to get his hands on the drugs.
In what I felt was a cross between Boyz N The Hood and City Of God, Dope is a film that to me tried to be everything all at once; it's a coming-of-age film, then it becomes a cat-and-mouse film, then it's a romance film, then it's a crime-caper type film. There's nothing wrong with combining all of these things, but in order to work a film like this has to have some kind of focus and that's really where a film like Dope falls down. In trying to do everything at once, it doesn't actually manage to really do anything very well and some of the strands of the story don't seem to get followed through properly (such as the drug-dealer chasing Malcolm for his drugs and what happened to Dom after he got arrested?). The romantic subplot between Malcolm and Dom's girl was underdeveloped (which was a shame as they clearly had a few things in common).
I also felt that Dope was a film that just tried far too hard and seemed to sledgehammer its point home at almost every given opportunity; I think the worst example of this was when the girl kept hitting the white guy for using the N word - I mean I understand the message that Famuyiwa was trying to get across, but he completely overdoes things here and it made me cringe due to the heavy-handed and clumsy way that Famuyiwa played out this scenario.
Dope is also chocked full of hipster dialogue but in an unfocused film with no solid narrative structure a lot of it just comes across as trite and boring. I could also criticise the film for offering nothing new to the genre, but that would be unfair as many films of this nature still have stories that are worth telling (no matter how unoriginal they are), but Dope was a film I could never get into and it's basically because it lacked any real intensity, it was unfocused and I never felt any connections to any of the characters. There is a twist to the story at the end which was quite amusing, but most of this film just fell flat for me.
The only positive thing that I've got to say about this film is that the acting was generally good (particularly between the 3 leads), but I'm struggling to think of anything else that I liked about it in all honesty.
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