As good as anybody should expect considering the cast, director, and narrow audience. The film glorifies violence and crime, yet tries to be preachy and engage brotherhood and unity during the last 10 minutes. Oh? They moved to Africa? How beautiful, idealogical and original.. You can't do that, it's not allowed. You also shouldn't shamelessly parrot Tony Montana, when the redundancy of your emulation is already apparent enough. Also, Dmx's character was too stupid to believably run anything.

Tries to be Scarface, Boyz N the Hood, and Menace 2 Society but the film is completely shallow. Hype Williams has a lot of style being that he has loads of credibility as a music video director but for feature films he doesn't understand pacing, dramatic weight, or narrative. Belly is still an interesting film to look at if you can just ignore the rather unoriginal and lame gangster subject matter.

My old roommate used to play this constantly. It blows and I hate it.

Hype Williams is not a good film director; he uses color saturations and style without purpose, which makes it look like the music videos from which he came. Also, the acting in this is pretty bad, and the overall story is pretty weak. It's not a good film, but maybe if you had it, it's tolerable enough to watch. DMX is the only one I felt had any modicum of talent. And narrative voice overs? Always a bad sign of lack of expositional idea. So yeah, I didn't like it, but I didn't mind it.

Some of acting is cringe-worthy, but thed stylish mood-themed cinematography and overall story arc is pretty unforgettable.