Ready 2 Die

I caught this movie on Netflix the other night and decided to write a review after thinking about it for a few days. I am always interested in films that take place in the hood and the cover caught my eye.

Obviously this is a small budget film and some of the special effects leave something to be desired. However, the actors do a good job in their respective roles. The pacing is a bit uneven and lags at times but overall the action sequences are pretty solid.

I liked the stylized, gritty look of the film it kind of reminds me of the look of "Man On Fire" only on a smaller budget.

Not to give too much of the plot a way, the story is about a group of friends, some ex-military, who decide to rob a bank. The film uses flashbacks to establish the backstory of each character to explain what got them to this point in their lives.

If you are in to "urban gangster" films this one should be in your library.

If it wasn't for, agreed, the cool-looking getaway car Ready 2 Die would have had no redeeming values at all. It could have been fun if done right, in the end it just ended up being unpleasant and ineptly done. The scenery and lighting look dull and the effects are cheesy and rather amateurish, but the camera work and editing do them no favours. In fact, the movie's visual look was one of its biggest flaws, it is shot so cheaply and in such a rushed way that it is enough to make one feel nauseous. The dialogue is riddled with clichés, doesn't even try to make sense and is horrendously stilted, the constant joking at horrible things like shooting people in the face were I feel in very bad taste. The story and characters are a huge issue as well. The story has no fun, excitement, suspense, momentum or any sense of danger, instead it's plodding, predictable and tasteless with very little happening in the storytelling, events that you can smell a mile off and the joking that makes you hate the characters more. The characters are incredibly shallow and you never get to know or identify with them, instead they are very obnoxious and have no redeeming qualities(no humanity at all seemingly) at all basically. They are also so similar that even figuring out who is who and who's the main one is difficult. The acting are a painful mix of annoying over-acting and some not even trying, it's not worth bothering naming standouts because there's not a single good performance among the cast. You know that's something wrong when the getaway car upstages the lot of them. The direction is on par with the camera work in ineptness, particularly in the action scenes which are incoherent and lacking in pretty much everything. The music is at best forgettable and is often repetitive and overbearing. All in all, apart from the car there is next to nothing good about Ready 2 Die, there are worse movies around, but that is no consolation and certainly no excuse for this level of badness. 2/10 Bethany Cox

So I saw a decent rating on this film om IMDb and thought to myself "Hey, it is only 80 minutes long and sounds interesting...why not?" HUGE MISTAKE!!!! This movie has so many Grand Theft Auto clichés that I truly think the writers of the movie/script played the game while coming up with material. Stereotypical thugs rob banks and flee from the police but at no time do they seem to be worried/threatened. Word gets out about the money they have. The dialogue is BEYOND horrible. Junior high kids talk about better things. Shot on a low budget with low expectations.

The only reason why it gets a 2 is because the getaway car is pretty cool. The camera work sucks The acting looks worse than a junior high school play. They did manage to have a few explosions but even those looked cheezy.

At no point in time do you feel any sympathy for the "good guys" (use that term loosely, after all, they brag about shooting innocent women). I found myself hoping they would get killed just so it would be OVER! After 60 minutes of watching, I literally was laughing at how horrible the plot was and why the hell I was still watching. If you make it that far, you deserve some kind of award.

AVOID!

The first thing that strikes me about Ready 2 Die is how well director John Azpilicueta utilizes limited resources and makes this feel like it had a much bigger budget than it probably did. The cinematographer in particular places you right in the action, as if you're a character in the film getting pulled through the action. This documentary feel was a smart choice for the story, as it ups the intensity, especially in the action scenes (which include one of the best car chase sequences I've seen in a long time). Not all of the acting is top notch, and there are some sound problems that would prevent this film from landing a perfect score, but there's enough good about it that it ranks as "very good- excellent" and is more than worth the watch.

But... Unfortunately I didn't and stuck around for the remaining 59 minutes.

Ready To Die is a classic Notorious BIG album, but Ready 2 Die (with a oh so clever change from the word 'to' to the number 2 instead, to signify this movie is 'hood' if there was any doubters who'd think otherwise, because that's how they do it in the hood, spell words wrong and type numbers that could replace words etc) will never become a classic... Anything... Not even a classic Asylum movie.

TBH, I don't think Asylum actually financed this movie cause it feels and looks really low budget, and considering how low budget Asylum's usual movies are you know how ridiculously low budget this must be right?

I think it's safe to say that they spend more money on getting a cool poster than they did on (trying but failing) to make a cool movie.

The movie is basically a deadly game of hide and seek about a group of robbers trying to hide with their new found wealth from gang-bangers with guns trying to steal their riches (how dare they?) and cops with arrest- warrants.

That might sound like fun, but it really isn't, and the acting is terrible, sure the actors might look the part with most of the cast playing moral-free latino gang-bangers, some to the point where I wonder if they didn't hire real gang-bangers in some of the roles... Cause they sure enough didn't hire real actors.

Fun fact: the f-word is used 187 times... per scene.

I mean I've seen Noel G in other movies where he was alright but not in this one though.

Yeah don't waste your time with this one, it's not worth it.

To paraphrase Jay-Z: "Like I told you to watch Ready 2 Die, No... Hov did that, so hopefully you don't have to go through that"