One of the countless scenes to inspire unintentional laughter in DMX's gangsta flick \Never Die Alone"" occurs when a character shouts, ""This isn't a Quentin Tarantino movie! This is real life!""
Oddly enough, it is at this point where director Ernest Dickerson apes Tarantino's ""Pulp Fiction"" with a ludicrous plot development that forces a nonlinear narrative to emerge. While ""Never Die Alone"" isn't a completely dreadful film, it is a failure because, among other things, it applies the techniques of other infinitely superior movies to a story that is mediocre and far-fetched in equal doses.
Based on a novel by ex-con Donald Goines, the film tells the story of King David (DMX), a repugnant drug dealer who is looking for redemption. Within the first 15 minutes, he is stabbed by another drug dealer's henchmen and driven to the hospital by bystander Paul (David Arquette). Before he dies, David finds time to bequeath his belongings to Paul, which include a watch, Arquette's pimpmobile and a Bible full of cassettes (which DMX recorded his life story on). The rest of the movie includes Arquette driving around listening to DMX's L.A. adventures on the cassettes, flashbacks to said adventures and a subplot concerning the henchman that stabbed David. This movie is as laughably overwrought as DMX's rap music, and its acting, writing and title have the quality of a 1970s porno.
If Dickerson got his film stock from dumpsters this wannabe epic's visuals couldn't be grimier. This really detracts from some of Dickerson's interesting camerawork (after all, he is Spike Lee's former director of photography). After ""Bulletproof"" and ""Bones"" controling the camera seems to be his sole moviemaking talent.
DMX unleashes the thuggish menace present in his rap with hilarious lines like ""I think I'm gonna, 'cause I wanna, pop pop pop!,"" but unfortunately his acting ranges from pissed-off to really pissed-off. Some of his awful lines, like ""let's go to the car; I think you left your halo in the backseat,"" feel like they've been written by George Lucas. This is a shame, because one of the movie's would-be attributes is its fearlessness in depicting the lead character as a louse. DMX's frequent practice of hooking his girlfriends on heroin when they request cocaine, thus making them entirely dependent on him, would be suitably disturbing and compelling in a movie that didn't contain this level of camp. The other characters are underwritten, which is a shame because Michael Ealy (the thug who stabs David) and David are pretty good.
What makes this movie frustrating is its vacillation in quality; it is way too campy to be taken seriously, but has a few too many decent scenes to reach the point of ""so bad it's good."" Dickerson's contrived, unoriginal thriller thinks it's an epic, but thanks to a preposterous plot and mostly amateurish acting, it is a soap opera with a lot of gangstas who like to go ""pop, pop, pop.\
