G

A hip-hop mogul (Richard T. Jones) buys a mansion in the Hamptons to be near his lost love (Chenoa Maxwell) and the husband for whom she dumped him (Blair Underwood). Director Christopher Scott Cherot and his co-writers, Andrew Lauren and Charles E. Drew Jr., update F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and they certainly deserve points for chutzpah—but there’s a reason this movie languished for three years before finding a distributor. Jones lends dignity to his character, and Underwood lends conviction to his, but other performances waver between awkward uncertainty and downright amateurishness. The film looks washed-out and cheap, and Cherot’s touch with the material is uncertain; it’s hard to tell whether he’s deliberately playing it as a raucous comedy or is ineptly trying for heavy drama.