I always thought Belly was terrible. Hype Williams can kiss my *** with all them colors. All it was good for was the intro and now the gif with my man Caine eating the banana
Belly is by most objective standards a bad movie... but I still like it. It suffers from extremely poor, almost non-existent pacing, a relatively weak plot and the casting and acting is really hit and miss. DMX did a great job as Buns but Nas' performance in the film is flat out terrible. All of his scenes give the impression that he's bored, tired and just reading the lines off the script verbatim.
Belly is interesting to analyze because in the same vein as a Tarantino movie, in the sense that it borrows liberally from other films and you can often get a better grasp of the the movie by watching the films it borrows from. Many of the scenes in the film pay homage to classic gangster movies and play out in a very similar fashion ; ie Lennox and Tommys car ride through Jamaica/Michaels car ride through Cuba in the Godfather or Lennox final scene/Final scene in Scarface.
The title of the movie "Belly" is something worth analyzing. Belly is short for "belly of the beast", the beast being America. This relates back to the idea of Williams borrowing themes from other filmmakers and applying them to Belly. Note the strange movie the guys are watching at Buns house in the beginning of the film as we are introduced to the characters... the movie with the little white boys playing with guns, one of them wearing rabbit ears. That was a clip from the movie Gummo, an extremely strange and grotesque film about rural American life. Gummo, much like Belly has absolutely no pacing, no plot and focuses much more on visual aspects than storyline. Both films showcase a different "underbelly" of the US; Gummo doing so with poverty stricken rural white people and Belly doing so with wealthy city dwelling black mobsters.
Fun Fact: There are 28 Grams in an oz (technically 28.3) and they spark exactly 28 blunts throughout the movie. I know this because I've counted many times and my friends and I used to make an event out of watching this movie by pre-rolling a whole Z and lighting one each time they did on screen.