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117 MINUTES | BOSTON COMMON + FENWAY + FRESH POND + CIRCLE/CHESTNUT HILL + SUBURBS Eminem went the family melodrama route for 8 Mile. For his own big-screen debut, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, a/k/a Marcus, has gone the family way as well and fused that genre to the gangster flick. It starts out with the legendary nine slugs that ripped into him from a would-be assassin and turned his life around. A flashback takes him from the murder of his dealer mother to his rise in the drug trade and his dabbling in hip-hop. (Best line in the film: "I pursued my dream of rap music for about three hours. Then I went back to selling coke.") So far, so good, with Jim Sheridan’s direction drawing out the sweetness from Jackson’s menacing reserve. Rather than focusing on how crime inspired the music, however, the film celebrates crime itself, or at least crime as films like Brian De Palma’s Scarface depict it, meandering into a revenge plot about who his dad was and who killed his mom. And what’s the deal with the naked men fighting in the shower? As for the music — like the star, it gets short-changed.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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