Bodied
I walked into this extremely apprehensive. My absolute love for battle rap clashed with how much I am not a fan of Joseph Khan's previous work. Especially Detention.But I'll be damned if he didn't knock this out of the park. This movie's absolutely fucking insane, but it's a brand of insane that feels channelled and refined. The movie's numerous battle sequences are fantastic, operating in this gritty hyper-reality that adds a lot of extra punch to some of the bars through neat visual effects. And some of those bars....Jesus christ. They get downright ruthless. Especially in the last 30 minutes.
The movie switches between a look into battling culture and a commentary against the kind of overtly uber-woke society that we live in today. At the same time, it uses the idea of battle rap being the (to paraphrase Khan) the "last bastion of free speech" and flipping it on its head, stating that "yeah, you can say anything you want in the battle, but there's still consequences from what you say."
It definitely suffers from it being too long at 2 hours (a good 20-25 minutes could get trimmed down), the relentless pacing of the movie can definitely get exhausting before the end of the movie and i think they needed to tackle more on the consequences of fucked-up, extremely problematic bars (not from the overly-woke perspective, but from the battling side), but as a longtime battle rap fan, I fucking love this shit. It's frenetic, it's hilarious, it's incisive, and it's extremely entertaining. it's everything i would want out of a movie like this, and more. Highly recommend seeing it if you get the chance.