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Starring Bakeem Woodbine, Cynda Williams.  Each film critic has his/her own method of determining whether any given film is just bad, or seemingly the next coming of Hudson Hawk. To me, a movie's kiss of death comes when I unconsciously check my watch during the screening. Checking the time signifies several different emotions in me, all being experienced at the same time: 1) boredom, 2) anger--how can a film be this bad?--and 3) intolerance--how much longer do I have to sit through this? Previously, Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder held the record; I checked my watch some fifteen minutes into the movie. Previously. I didn't even get through the opening credits of Caught Up, featuring money falling like rain that was transposed over a slowly revolving handgun, before I peeked down at my watch, a miraculous 48 seconds in. There is no disguising the fact that Caught Up is a low-budget film, but worse yet, is that Caught Up is a rather uncreative, poorly written, low-budget film. It stars Bokeem Woodbine--a fact that some might argue is the film's 2nd kiss of death, considering Woodbine's headlining appearances in the less than stellar The Substitute, Almost Heroes and The Big Hit--as one of the, how should I put this, biggest dumbasses west of the Mississippi. Envious of the mental faculties of Homer Simpson, Woodbine's character spends several stays in a state penitentiary, once for unknowingly participating in an armed bank robbery. Upon being paroled, Woodbine begins to work for a limousine company that specializes in trafficking weapons, drugs, and women. He meets Cynda Williams and, again, becomes unwittingly and unknowingly involved in crime as Williams' partner in the theft/sale of several million dollars worth of diamonds. The main problem with Caught Up boils down to writer/director Darin Scott's decision to create a protagonist who is both stupid, constantly making the wrong choices, and unsympathetic. It's one thing for a film to focus on a mentally challenged individual like Forest Gump or Being There's Chauncey Gardener, but it is another matter entirely to have a contingent of characters who have forgotten to turn their brains on after crawling out of bed in the morning. Who greets an ex-con by sticking a gun in his face while he sleeps, and then is surprised by the result barrage of punches? Who steals $4 million worth of diamonds and then can't figure out why the rightful owner is looking for them? And who in their right mind would get involved with a woman with a history of criminal acts while working hard to stay out of jail on parole? Along with several rather unoriginal stunts, Scott includes numerous rapper cameos in Caught Up, Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J being the two most notable. However, this isn't anything but a rather obvious marketing device that attempts to direct the focus of my criticisms off the script it would be an understatement to call bad, and onto the fact that popular personalities like Snoop and LL are in the film. There were moments of interest in Caught Up, the fact that Williams' character has ESP for one, but Scott took the film away from these points of intrigue until, ultimately, I found myself looking at my watch than at the on screen action.
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