Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

The hip-hop movement has undoubtedly become one of the urban African American community’s biggest vehicles to be heard in the media. Through the years, it has been a voice for social change and awareness into the realities of bleak urban living.

However, now that the hip-hop movement has become big business in the music industry, it seems to compulsively adhere to the very urban clichés it had once sought to be an alternative from. While first-time director Michael Jude Murphy attempts to use the hip-hop format to bring this to light, his first film 6 Brothaz in A Cadillac largely fails on its well-intended promise.

The story is centers around Militant Mic (Tre Hardison a.k.a. rapper The Pharcyde), an aspiring young rapper who seeks to get out of his ghetto town. However, he also seeks to elevate himself above his peers, who in his eyes, denigrate themselves by using the racial epithet “nigga” as a term for endearment.

He and his five friends are members of a hip-hop sextet known as Solid Entertainment, who aspire to get a record deal to get out of their ghetto surroundings. The film centers around their journey in their Cadillac to a hip-hop battle competition where they compete against rival local rap groups in order to win the prize of a record deal.

Along the way, the group encounters perils along the way. These include bad trips from LSD-laced marijuana sold by their dealer, getting stopped by the police under the pretense of driving a stolen car and briefly thrown in jail, and encountering young black kids who spray graffiti on the walls.

As Solid Entertainment deals with these perils, Militant notices how each of the people they encounter use the word “nigga” casually. When they are thrown in jail, a middle aged black inmate essentially mocks the group and their peers for essentially failing to aspire to the promise of their civil-rights-fighting generation of their elders. Militant also notices how young urban kids, in particular, say the word “nigga” without a second thought.

What has to be said, in reviewing a film like this, is that Jude-Murphy’s attempts to raise the issue of self-denigration in the urban African American community make this film well-intentioned. However, much of the film is told in such a laughably comical premise that any good intention seems rather thrown by the wayside in exchange for the cheap entertainment of his target audience.

First off, the way the main characters are standard urban clichés, seen already in far too many hip-hop videos and films. They don’t serve very well to the film’s idea of a positive hip-hop group, particularly a member whose stuttering, seemingly birth-defected character