Metacritic Film

Bones

Starring Snoop Doggy Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss, Sean Amsing, Ron Selmour, and Kirby Morrow

MPAA RATING: R for violence/gore, language, sexuality and drugs

New Line Cinema
Horror
93 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters October 24, 2001

Over 20 years after his violent death in 1979, Jimmy Bones (Dogg) returns as a ghost to wreak revenge on those who killed him and to clean up his crime and drug filled neighborhood.

WRITTEN BY
Adam Simon
Tim Metcalfe

DIRECTED BY
Ernest R. Dickerson

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

42 / 100

Critic Reviews

80 Variety
A sly mix of haunted house melodrama, slasher pic mayhem and retro-blaxploitation iconography, spiced with dollops of grisly, dark comedy.
75 Entertainment Weekly
Snoop invests snarling meanness with as much authority as Clint Eastwood used to. As an actor, does this Dogg know any more tricks? At this point, he may not have to.
70 The New York Times
In exalting the very worst of humanity, Bones displays a special glee and an unusual density of scary imagery.
63 Miami Herald Chris Hewitt
Director Ernest Dickerson uses elegant visuals, suspenseful editing and lighting to give Bones its edge.
60 Mr. Showbiz
The rapper-ever-increasingly-turned actor -- is having the time of his life, big pimp styling in a flashy wardrobe as he guts and struts.
50 TV Guide
With his spidery fingers and his velvet eyes, the lean, languid Snoop Dogg was born to be an undead player, and clearly relishes the role of Jimmy Bones.
50 Washington Post Richard Harrington
Too much of Bones feels transplanted from genre staples like "Hellraiser," "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Evil Dead."
50 Boston Globe
You'll laugh at Bones a lot more often than you'll be scared by it, assuming you'll be scared at all.
50 New York Daily News
A ghetto horror movie that sets up some decent scares before becoming so amused with itself, it's a wonder we don't hear the crew laughing.
50 Austin Chronicle
Dogg has the makings of a genuinely great actor. When he's on screen the film crackles, and even when he's not it's a trippy, funhouse ride.
50 USA Today
If grossness gives you the giggles, at least a couple of the movie's effects indeed put a little "wow" in this cinematic bowwow.
40 Chicago Reader
The tectonic shifts in this camp-horror extravaganza are unsettling.
40 LA Weekly
Director Ernest -- doesn't skimp on style in a film that bluntly exploits social conscience to pump up its taste for gore.
40 New Times (L.A.)
Full of fits and starts, it never really gets going, stalling at every turn without even giving us enough of what we paid to see -- Snoop Dogg and gore.
40 Los Angeles Times
The movie is over the top and garish. Its transitions often are sloppy and crude. But it brandishes its excesses like a loud, retro suit.
40 Village Voice
Bones splits the difference between horror and social commentary, with pallid returns.
40 Salon.com
Too jumbled to become the major pop hit it wants to be. But it's not an entirely bad film despite its lack of coherence. Horror aficionados and other midnight-movie fans shouldn't miss it.
38 Baltimore Sun
Regrettably, Bones is what passes for horror these days: Throw a lot of graphic, gore-filled, darkly lit stuff on the screen, and see what sticks. Discerning moviegoers should pass on the opportunity.
38 New York Post
A silly, boring supernatural thriller that squanders a potentially interesting premise and the rapper Snoop Dogg in his ostensible starring debut.
10 Film Threat
Nothing sums up Bones better than its parting shot, in which maggots are projectile vomited directly toward the audience. How so very appropriate.
0 San Francisco Chronicle
Doesn't work at all. Even the structure is off.

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