MOVIE REVIEW

Wassup Rockers

By Jay Carr, Newsday, Zap2It.com | July 12, 2008

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Francisco Pedrasa and Jessica Steinbaum in 'Wassup Rockers'
Francisco Pedrasa and Jessica Steinbaum in 'Wassup Rockers'
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C'mon, Larry. Tell us you were kidding, and your new movie, which plays like a joke, was meant as a joke.

It's stereotypes on parade, starting with a South Central L.A. drive-by shooting over the opening credits, moving into a lot of scattershot talk, then into a cross between "Stand By Me" and "Saving Private Ryan," as a crew of Salvadoran teens bus into Beverly Hills and only escape the murderous monsters who live there when a network of kindly Latina domestics turns into an Underground Railway to get them out.

The gangstas who ask the question that gives the film its title are saints compared to the 90210 whites -- a rich skank who wants to bed them, vicious WASP preppies who beat them up, a gay perv, a white homeowner modeled on Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston who plugs one of them, a white racist cop happy to hush up the shooting, and the shooter's wife bent on turning one of the muchachos into her boytoy.

They almost divert us with this garish, underscripted film, where shock theater turns into shlock theater before our eyes.
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