Rapturious review by The Grim Ringler

Rapturious

It’s an interesting thing that filmmakers do when they try to make a film based around a sub-culture. It isn’t that these are not valuable films but rather the filmmakers seem too often to take the easy route, not delving beneath the initial veneer but relying on that to tell their tale. So it is with RAPTURIOUS, a film that makes you pause from its clumsy title alone, but gets only worse, the deeper you look.

RAPTURIOUS is the tale of an up and coming rapper, judged because he is a white rapper and coming from a tough background. For him, it’s all about the music, but for his label, they are all about the product and to them, he IS that product. The game of being a rapper though and promoting it isn’t something that this performer finds to his liking though. He doesn’t want to explain what he is, what he does, and what he believes. He doesn’t want to tell people why he is what he is, he wants to use his music to tell those stories and the stories of all people who have suffered. Lately though, most of his suffering comes in the form of his dreams, which have been getting more surreal and more disturbing. In his dreams, he keeps seeing images of Hell and of demons and bit by bit these dreams begin slipping over into his real life and are affecting his art and makes him wonder if the dreams are more real than his own waking life.

RAPTURIOUS is a well intentioned film but it falls far short of its lofty goal. The film begins, oddly enough, with a long sequence set during the old west and this really puts you off on the wrong foot because you go in ready for a rap film and suddenly it’s a western. This doesn’t last long though and in no time at all we’re living our low rent ICP fantasies. There are moments where the film rises above itself but truly, these are few and far between. The movie just doesn’t work. The effects are pretty low rent, as is the direction and, while I give credit to avoiding making this as one note as they could have (while I make an ICP reference, they do avoid making him the average ‘white rapper’ that I expected coming into it), the film is just too much miss and not enough hit. Perhaps the filmmakers will learn from this and will make a more effective film next time around.

…c…


4 out of 10 Jackasses

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