Shottas For Life

It's tough to imagine how someone could make a movie about Jamaican gangsterism that's so devoid of political content, but that's hardly Silvestra's biggest problem.

Shottas has everything a bad music video should have -- close-ups of foreign sports cars, women with painful-looking implants stepping in and out of hot tubs, ugly men with gold teeth waving around automatics.

Stars from reggae and other musical worlds give acting a try in Shottas, a witless, misogynistic, gratuitously violent, drug-culture-worshiping film.

Writer-director Cess Silvera delivers an empty, bullet-riddled exploitation combo of attitude and poses.

Unless you love senseless violence and gratuitous shots of fake breasts, you might want to listen with your eyes closed.

Who says they don't write good women's roles anymore? The females on view fall into two prototypes: Hot Tub Chippie No. 2 or Plastic Surgery Fire Sale Victim No. 3.

A straight-ahead Jamaican gansta flick, it's a lot of fun, if empty.

Even with its microbudget there's enough blood, booty and bling to satisfy fans of the genre. It's also never dull, thanks to Silvera's restless pacing and a great reggae soundtrack.

De Palma and Scorsese breathed new life into the crime genre; Silvera just embalms it.

Crime flicks featuring nihilistic thugs engaged in futile, sometimes humorously soulless violence accompanied by a hip soundtrack aren't a commodity. And nothing in this energetic, hollow movie boosts its marketability or appeal.

Shottas, a Jamaican-set underworld flick executive produced by musician Wyclef Jean and being given a pat-on-the-head theatrical release in advance of its DVD peddling from Sony Pictures later this year, is proof that a movie can at least on some l

It would have been a more worthy effort to get past the lifestyle sheen to the emotional undercurrents of men who choose violence at every turn.