A stupid, hypocritical, depressing movie.

Rating: 1/10 (24 April 2020)

So at the very end of the movie, after spending well over 6 months in movie time making wrong life choices and selling his soul to The Man and suffering greatly and being partly responsible for enormous suffering of his son and wife, The Man finally decides to give Chris a tiny piece of the big money cake. There's no creativity, no light, no brilliance, just suffering, submission, and hard work. And this is supposed to be an inspiring morality tale?
I had great hopes of this movie, and throughout was willing myself to love it, despite its extensive longueurs and the fact that Chris kept making very questionable decisions. The suffering was relentless, and I kept hoping that it would all make sense in the end. It didn't. Chris did not make it big by inventing something, by being original, by taking the path less traveled. No, he made it big by buying wholesale into the capitalist American dream, where only money and hard work matter.
I should have known right at the start that this movie wasn't going to be a social critique, despite the gritty images. The dreadful sentimental music was a dead give-away that that the grittiness was all surface, and the heart of the movie was one long justification of a sick system: the idea that anyone can make it if you work hard enough. This myth is one of the many sicknesses of the American system, because the fact is, only the odd person makes it in this way, because the system is dramatically skewed in favor of the already rich.
The only thing that makes this movie watchable is Will Smith's performance. And as you get dragged along by this, for nearly 2 long hours, all the time waiting for a moment of transcendence, of redemption, of inspiration, it only becomes obvious in the very last minutes that the movie has its heart entirely in the wrong place.
Intelligent perspectives could have been given on the fundamental unfairness of the system, on race, and on other things. But in the end, the only things that matter are money, and the way to get it is by sucking up to The Man and working harder than anyone else. It leaves a terrible taste in the mouth. What a stupid, empty, depressing movie. Ugh.