Belly, the lone feature filmmaking credit of legendary music video director Hype Williams, is a stark meditation on spiritual rot and impossible choices, albeit one that is cleverly disguised as a drug thriller starring in-demand hip-hop stars. The film is also a slick, canny reimagining of the American neo-noir template: one that owes as much to the seminal crime literature of Walter Mosley and Donald Goines as it does to Blaxploitation cinema of the 1970’s as Superfly and Black Caesar appear to have been touchstones for Mr. Williams' modern cult classic.

In a superficial context, Belly belongs to a lineage of gangsta-rap crime cinema that was popular from the early 90's well into the 2000's. It's a group of films that includes genre items like Paid In Full, State Property, I Got The Hook-Up, and others that star the likes of Cam’Ron, Memphis Bleek, etc. Near the apex of this tier, you have superlative works like New Jack City and the tremendous, Bill Duke-directed Deep Cover. That latter film, with its sardonic, seemingly omniscient hard-boiled voiceover and pungent pointillist depiction of the Los Angeles underworld, owes much to the Raymond Chandler playbook.

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Image via Artisan Entertainment

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To the untrained eye, Belly might seem like it belongs in the former category, but it’s got more in common with Deep Cover and, indeed, simmering vintage noirs like Crime Wave and They Drive By Night than it does with any of the more recent movies we’ve just mentioned. Eschewing the oft-repeated misconception that all noirs should fundamentally showcase detectives as their (anti)heroes, Belly’s lead characters barely even acknowledge the law, or the larger civilian world that the police claim to serve and protect. The world that these characters inhabit is a shadow necropolis of death, money, drugs, and designer goods: a large-scale free-fire zone where remedies for pain are bought and sold for cheap, futures are regularly laid to waste, and petty disputes are meted out in blood.

Belly announces its astonishing visual ambition in its unforgettable, now-iconic opening scene. Like many a noir, Belly begins with a big sting. We meet best friends Buns (DMX) and Sin a.k.a. Sincere (fellow New York rap legend Nas) as they are about to rob a nightclub. To the haunting sounds of Soul II Soul’s “However Do You Want Me (Back To Life”), the opening credits proceed to unfurl over nightmarish footage that depicts the crew strolling into the nightclub in slow-motion, bathed in cascading, backlit strobe lights that render the subsequent sequences of carnage as a kind of psychedelic spectacle. These introductory images are hallucinatory and unusually arresting in their abstract composition, instantly announcing Williams’ ferocious morality tale as not just another rote hip-hop thriller, but a self-aware genre homage with gripping, life-or-death stakes.

The film – which sees Buns graduating from street dealing to politicking with fearsome, well-connected Jamaican drug lords via a potent new form of heroin he finds himself distributing, ultimately emerging as a force to be reckoned with in the Queens, N.Y. criminal underworld where most of the action unfolds – is largely narrated by Nas’ winsome Sincere. If Buns is the frequent instigator between the two – and to be sure, the late, great DMX plays the more volatile of the two men with plenty of his familiar, gravel-voiced intensity – then Sincere is most assuredly the more level-headed of the pair. Like Philip Marlowe, Sin is a cool-headed observer: rarely one to start trouble, though one could argue that remaining passive in amoral situations its own form of ethical deficiency.

Sincere’s bemused narration is a critical component of Belly’s success, ultimately cementing the noir comparison. Sincere recalls his brutal past in clear-eyed, unsentimental detail, rarely professing remorse for any of his cruel or misguided actions. If nothing else, like any good noir narrator, Sincere seems a little shocked to be alive after enduring all that he has. By his own metric, he and all his friends should be dead. And as with any worthwhile noir narrator, there is a growing, creeping dread in our hero's voice when he recalls past misdeeds. After all, it’s no mistake that the character’s abbreviated name is “Sin."

Like classic film noirs like Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, Belly unfolds in a cynical and pitiless world where trust and mercy are in short supply. Women are regularly and unfortunately reduced to their purely transactional qualities, and the American metropolis is depicted as a forbidding, even dangerous place – and perhaps an alluring one, provided the thrill of making money is enough for someone to want to regularly put their life on the line. In the noir pantheon, money truly is the root of all evil: the characters in these stories are constantly robbing, lying, and killing in pursuit of the almighty dollar, pushing a boulder up the Sisyphean hill that is capitalist exploitation. To quote the great minds in the Wu-Tang Clan, in Belly, cash rules everything. The result? Absolute moral entropy.

Nas is a modestly commanding screen presence in Belly, but few would argue that the legendary Illmatic MC deserves to be mentioned in the breath with some of the great rapper-turned-actors (LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, etc.) of recent decades. While a few other rappers make memorable appearances in the film, including a rowdy, smack-talking Method Man, Belly belongs to DMX, whose terse severity makes him the ideal antihero for a hip-hop-styled noir. Buns remains a despicable character for much of Belly, but within the corroded moral universe that this movie presents, one could argue that he’s merely playing the hand that’s been dealt to him. What’s more is that X’s anguish suggests an inner life that Nas’ Sincere sometimes lacks: as a performer, X possesed the kind of haunted gravitas that made actors like Humphrey Bogart and Sterling Hayden staples of the American Midcentury noir.

Belly, like any good noir, unfolds in a landscape without much hope. It is a landscape where personal bonds are regularly tested, friendship almost always comes with a catch, and the bad guys always come out on top. It is, in other words, a world that’s going to hell, and Hype Williams captures the destruction of its denizens with diamond-sharp clarity of vision. Belly is a masterpiece of remixed American noir, and one of the most visually iconic films of its decade.