Something about this movie was a little off for me. The reviews are ecstatic, and it seemed to do extremely well at the specialty box office but I just can’t help thinking that most people might feel cheated out of 15 bucks if they’re paying to watch a movie that is basically a less successful mish-mash of other movies. “Dope” is both an homage to 90’s/00’s hang-out comedies like “Friday” but also believes it’s better and smarter than those films, and is a little smug about it. It really believes it’s doing something interesting, and there is perhaps nothing worse than watching a generic indie comedy that thinks it’s reinventing the (hamster) wheel it’s running on.
What Works: The cast brings their all to these roles, and Zoe Kravitz is especially good in the “hot girl/dream girl” role, rocking braids and more depth than perhaps the role is written with. And seeing supermodel Chanel Iman as a Molly-snorting party girl is certainly surprising, even if this only highlights the somewhat one-note characters (especially for the female characters): tomboyish lesbian, party girl, ghetto girl, hard-working Saint single mom, dream girl dating a drug dealer who falls for a nerd, etc…
What Doesn’t: …Which isn’t to say that a movie with a big cast has to make every single role three dimensional, but my bigger problem with “Dope” is that so few of them are, and that’s largely because the movie is so overstuffed with aimless side-trips and transgressions. Towards the end, you begin to realize that you’ve really seen about four different movies—coming of age comedy that morphs into wild times comedy that morphs into drug dealer success dramedy that keeps picking up romantic comedy scenes only to forget about them for whole chunks at a time—and maybe none of the loose storytelling or lengthy side plots would bother me so much if the comedy was funnier or the dramatic arc for the lead character (nerd to kingpin to college…which sounds great, but isn’t really presented in such a clear-cut way) didn’t feel almost beside the point.
What I Would Have Done Differently: There’s just something tonally at war with itself about a comedy that wants to be saying something unique and different…but isn’t really saying anything unique or different. “Dope” is happy to pay tribute to an era that it thinks it’s smarter than without really changing all that much. It needed to pick a tighter run-time or funnier jokes, but part of that would be deciding if the movie is meant to be a goofy-times comedy or a dramatically richer character story about an inner city nerd outmanuevering everyone. Either of them would be great, but together they never really mesh.