Metacritic Film

Whiteboys

Starring Danny Hoch, Dash Mihok, Mark Webber, Piper Perabo, Eugene Byrd, and Bonz Malone

MPAA RATING: R for pervasive language, substance abuse, some violence and sexuality

20th Century Fox
Drama
92 minutes | Color
USA / France
Released In Theaters October 8, 1999

A funny and searing look at America's youth struggling to find their place amidst a sea of designer labels in an image-driven society. Flip (Hoch) is the hip hop poet of his own white boy crew. The son of a working class Iowa family, Flip just wants "to keep it real" by moving into the Chicago ghetto to live and write million-dollar rap hits like his heroes. (Fox Searchlight)

WRITTEN BY
Garth Belcon
Danny Hoch
Mark Levin
Richard Stratton

DIRECTED BY
Marc Levin

Overall Metascore

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

45 / 100

Critic Reviews

70 TV Guide
Hoch's very funny satire on racial stereotyping cuts both ways.
70 The New York Times Anita Gates
Deceptively silly, ultimately intelligent.
50 New York Daily News Robert Dominguez
Despite its good intentions, Whiteboys -- a serio-comic examination of hip-hop's influence on suburban white youth -- comes off as little more than a fleshed-out skit.
50 New York Post
Without a real story to go with the notion of Farm Belt "wiggas," the humor wears thinner and thinner until it disappears.
50 Entertainment Weekly
Dopey, not dope.
40 Village Voice
Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.
40 LA Weekly Paul Cullum
Can never quite decide whether it's after the humor implicit in what seems conceived as satire, or the agitprop frissons of race and class theory.
40 Los Angeles Times
Documents accurately the capacity of pop culture to make mongrels of its consumers. But it doesn't quite know (or want to know) what to make of it.
30 Variety Lisa Nesselson
Too many scenes play like actors acting rather than life being lived as pic lurches around with ragged variations in tone.

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