bomb this movie

Bomb the System
Starring: Mark Webber, Gano Grills, Bonz Malone
(Palm Pictures)

"Wild Style" may have been the only hip-hop motion picture to prominently feature graffiti. There are others, like "Beat Street," but none of them have stood the test of time like "Wild Style." Unfortunately, "Bomb the System" is just another forgotten movie to throw onto the growing pile of ridiculously bad hip-hop movies.

Set to a "score" by Def Jux honcho and former Company Flow rapper, El-P, "Bomb the System" follows a writer named Blest who, in the span of a week or so, is faced with the prospects of college, a new love, a war with a ragtag pair of cops dubbed "the Vandal Squad," and his disintegrating relationship with his best friend, Buk 50.

Movies like "Bomb the System" are a mixed blessing (no pun intended). On the one hand, it's far more sophisticated than "Killa Season" (which isn't very hard to eclipse intellectually, I suppose). The flick deals a lot with human emotion and the on-screen characters are not afraid to show it, whether it would be anger or sorrow. Hip-Hop deals a lot with masking your true feelings and not letting people into your head, or heart for that matter.

But for all the emotional conflict that makes this movie fairly decent, there's also a loose plotline that's strung together by bland acting, a non-existent script, a bad soundtrack and really annoying music video-style editing. The last one being the worst crime of them all since it seems as though director Adam Bhala Lough saw the Michel Gondry DVD, got his hands on Adobe Premiere and went to town.

As bad as Lough tried to make "Bomb the System" his "Wild Style" (even going as far as getting Lee Quinones to do a cameo as himself), it's more like "Juice" except with graffiti. It has a lot of similar elements in terms of how relationships -- both romantic and platonic -- can affect (or be affected by) dreams, art, and age.

In short, "Bomb the System" isn't too different from a writer whose work is commited to notebooks rather than walls. All flash and no balls.