Message to our children: First, DO NOT SNITCH

Rating: 10/10 (24 August 2007)

I give the film 10 out of 10 stars because it drives home the don't-snitch message currently sweeping our ghettos in a way few films ever could. I can't think of a better actor than Will Smith to deliver this message either, because his existence is testimony to the fact that it's not who you know or what you know, but how you look. This film has everything: a male eye-candy actor delivering a powerful, phantom message to a receptive audience that loves those who tell it what it wants to hear.
Charles Gardner is living proof that if you don't rock the boat, don't rat out those who break the law, and are an activist on issues that have no true opposition (who is in favor of poverty?), you'll be revered for taking a nonexistent stand, and rewarded for being a useful pawn of the powerful and corrupt. Watching this film, you'd think racism and sexual harassment were historical artifacts, and that the reason whistleblowers have little or nothing to fear is that there simply are no more whistles to blow because the world is now a happy place where everyone does the right thing.
The fact is, had Gardner ever become a true whistleblower, ever compalined about the massive sexual harassment in the culture that made him rich, ever complained (as in filed suit over) racial disparity, or ever blown a whistle on any dishonest people in his industry, his success story never would have been told because it never would have happened, as his career would have stopped on a dime. It's not like he or anyone else who climbs the Wall Street ladder doesn't know this; after all, someone with mouths to feed can't go around getting themselves fired for doing the right thing or standing up to evil. Better to just play along, cash in by being silent, and then leave those who fight the system to starve so that eventually they'll shut up. There is nothing wrong with what Gardner did in bettering his life, but there was nothing right with it either. Right would have required far more. You didn't see Martin Luther King cashing in on government contracts instead of protest marching, but I guess in this day and age all problems are solved and there is nothing left to protest, so it's all good.
As a white male who has confronted racists and sexual harassers in the workplace, and wound up blacklisted in retaliation by many of the same people that both Gardner and Smith call friends and do business with themselves, I cannot begin to explain the awful place God must have reserved for these two who dare to attach morality to their greed and career opportunism, as if them getting rich by rewarding don't-snitch behavior somehow meant that the world were suddenly a better place. I suppose when one is wealthy, they have to downplay injustice and their own cowardice in refusing to fight, because otherwise they might actually have to pitch in, offend the corrupt, and actually fight for something.
Will Smith and Charles Gardner are nothing more than wealthy cowards, men whose mark on this world will not include any victories over our true evils, but rather a messge from them, through this movie, that your problems are your own doing, including any problems that may have been caused by you being too stupid to realize that in this society, to get ahead, you must not nnitch, for even if you are homeless and shirtless, and with far less skills than any fired whistleblower, Wall Street will hire you as long as it does not consider you a threat to rat them out.
I can almost picture Will Smith arrogantly pontificating in Oprah's chair again like he once did when he toyed with the idea of becoming President one day, speaking of "haters" and how "negative" it is to point out things like this, yet to folks like Martin Luther King, the negative people were the ones who stood down in the face of injustice and stood on the sidelines because it was simply more profitable to do so.
Like it or not, when it comes to standing up against racism, I am blacker than Gardner or Smith will ever be, but that is also why I am not richer. I am viewed as a traitor to my own race, which didn't surprise me, but that the race I "betrayed" my own race to help didn't seem to want that help, did. It was then that I realized that Black is a state of mind, not a skin color.