ViewGuide

Created Dec 25, 2014 11:09AM PST • Edited Oct 31, 2017 10:20AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Chris Rock scores a solid hit with Top Five by making his movie about himself. Well, not himself exactly, but an alter ego: a big-time comedian/moviestar. Andre Allen is his name and he’s going to marry Kim Kardashian on a Reality TV special. Oops, scratch that, he’s going to marry Gabrielle Union, playing a talent-free Reality TV star modeled on Kim Booty. It’s a well conceived, insightful and often LOL movie.

   It’s also a full-employment act for black entertainers: comics, rappers, actresses. Several bold-faced white comics are thrown in for good measure. For Chris Rock, even Jerry Seinfeld will come out and shoot a scene at Scores New York. Seinfeld to a stripper who stole his wallet: “Do I really have to say!”

   Rock and Rosario Dawson courting on the streets of Manhattan, waxing on about the City and life, has been compared to Woody Allen and Diane Keaton doing the same in Annie Hall. Fair enough. Update that to 2014 from a Black POV – the year of Grand Jury Anger & Obama Fatigue – and you’ve got Top Five.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Chris Rock modeled Andre Allen on himself: self-aware, sure of himself, super funny. He also made him an alcoholic, which may or may not be true to Rock himself. It leavens the movie, that’s for sure.

   Rosario Dawson is strong and lovely as the NY Times writer who bags a couple of days with him.

   Posse

   • J.B. Smoove as his boyhood friend grown to be Body Man, goes by Silk. Smoove is.
   • Gabrielle Union as a Kim Kardashian knockoff who knows how to seduce a man. Dwayne Wade’s wife has got it going on.
   • Cedric the Entertainer as Jazzy Dee: He’s The Man in Houston.
   • Tracy Morgan as Rock’s kin
   • Kevin Hart was in almost every trailer that ran before Top Five started, and then had a memorable cameo as Rock’s agent. The guy is funny but overexposed.
   • Luis Guzmán as a fellow action-movie actor
   • Romany Malco as Benny Barnes
   • Hayley Marie Norman as Tammy
   • Anders Holm as Brad
   • Karlie Redd as Rhonda

   Themselves

   • Jerry Seinfeld
   • Adam Sandler
   • Whoopi Goldberg
   • Taraji P. Henson
   • Gabourey Sidibe
   • DMX
   • Charlie Rose
   • Bruce Bruce
   • Opie and Anthony

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Really Great 4.5

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    Top Five is winningly written and directed by Chris Rock. I say let him write and direct many more.

    Ideally his future films won’t be marred by cheap tricks like turnstile jumping.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    Rock’s film reaches the upper bounds of Comedy Club Wisdom, ostentatiously keeping it real by expounding on Black populist moral equivalence. To wit, a rebel slave leader killing 50,000 white people is equated to George W. Bush supposedly killing brown people. Nevermind that pretty much everything is wrong with that equation, starting with the fallacy that Bush had people killed because of ethnicity. It’s just one of many nutty theories about all sorts of racial and sexual shit. Another concerns the original Planet of the Apes coming out just before Martin Luther King was assassinated. His theory is that James Earl Ray saw the Apes as Blacks and couldn’t stand to see them dominate. Ah, the wacky mind of a comedian…

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.5

    Occasionally nasty well beyond the bounds of decency, though many a mean comedian has riffed on the Kennedy assassination.

    Also notable is how sexually outspoken are both genders, though perhaps that’s because the movie was written by a guy.

17. Sex Titillating 2.1

18. Violence Fierce 1.7

19. Rudeness Nasty 3.7

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Three underlying worldviews get explored in Top Five: Black America in 2014, celebrity life, and alcoholism. Each is fascinating, but the third is most bracing. Chris Rock and Rosario Dawson turn much of their byplay into a cinematic AA meeting, describing their rock-bottom experiences, love of booze, temptations and frustrations with being alcoholic. Let’s hope some people are helped by seeing this.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.6

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0