DVD REVIEW (posted 4/16/03)

Movie:

Disc:

The Movie: In this hip-hop Purple Rain, Eminem plays Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith, a sulking metalworker and aspiring rapper who, with a ragtag bunch of friends (including the excellent Mekhi Phifer, as Future), battles members of a rival posse at a Detroit club. Love him or hate him, the wide-eyed Eminem is a sufficient actor (granted, the film is semiautobiographical), and, as in his music, he snaps alive like a lit firecracker when angry.

The Disc: The millions of teenage boys who'll buy this Eminem-heavy DVD (with extras available in censored and uncensored versions) will especially love "The Music of 8 Mile" and the "Superman" video, which, perhaps due to the appearance of porn star Gina Lynn, isn't being shown on MTV. For the rest of us, there's still some interesting stuff here, notably a short in which director Curtis Hanson offers the restless extras a chance to battle the star in an unscripted scene. These scenes show rap at its most organic and the star in his element: As Eminem the actor tries to pantomime the raps to save his voice, Eminem the rapper can't stay quiet.

—C.M.

1/2

In his acting debut, Eminem delivers an honest, understated performance as Jimmy Smith, Jr., a.k.a. B. Rabbit, a mercury-mouthed white boy with emcee aspirations. Directed by Curtis Hanson (Wonder Boys), the loosely biographical story is set in Detroit during 1995 when hip-hop still had its edge. Unfortunately, edge is exactly what this film lacks.

Producer Brian Grazer intended this to be hip-hop's answer to Saturday Night Fever — but while John Travolta danced a streak through the latter, it isn't until 8 Mile's last ten minutes, a climactic emcee battle, that we finally get to see the self-proclaimed king of controversy doing what he does best. Only then does Hanson use Eminem to his full potential in a scene so electric it crackles.

Otherwise, 8 Mile treads too lightly. Though named for the infamous dividing line between the city's blacks and whites, it streamlines racial issues and overdoes it with the loveable gangsta types (to judge by Scott Silver's script, the real class separation in Detroit is not between the haves and have-nots but rather those with nicknames — Future, Wink, and Cheddar Bob, to list a few — and those without).

Still, most of the scenes involving B. Rabbit and his peeps ring with truth, to the credit of Silver and Hanson, who reconstructed some of the dialogue based on input by Eminem's real-life Detroit friends. Less interesting are the perennially freaky Brittany Murphy as Jimmy's girlfriend, Alex, a wannabe model whose life's goal is "gettin' out of the D," and Kim Basinger as his faded trailer park mom.

—Brooke Hauser