Chances are, if you watched a hip-hop or R&B music video throughout the 1990s or 2000s, it was directed by Hype Williams. The graffiti-artist-turned-filmmaker worked with all the biggest artists through the era when the short films produced to promote singles and albums were a cottage industry with significant cultural impact. In 1998, at the height of his creative powers, Williams co-wrote and directed the cult classic crime thriller “Belly,” an iconic blast of pop art noir featuring the hottest NYC rappers of the time. Nearly thirty years later, it remains the only feature film he’s ever directed.
“Belly” is a simple enough film plot-wise. It follows Sincere and Tommy “Buns” Brown, a pair of criminals and close friends played by rappers Nas and DMX, respectively. The duo engage in a variety of hustles, but from the outset it’s clear that Sincere, a family man, is already seeing the bars of the cage their vocation has them trapped inside, while Brown, a wilder sort, is content to rage against them for as long as he can. When Brown decides to move into the drug trade, it lights the first in a long line of fuses that end up exploding their way of life.
Narratively, “Belly” has a lot in common with “Mean Streets,” the 1973 Martin Scorsese picture that proved a breakout for the director as well as its two stars, Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. The relationship between Keitel’s Charlie Cappa and De Niro’s Johnny Boy shares its DNA with the dueling temperaments of Sincere and Brown. As an actor, Nas is no Keitel, but DMX’s unique and menacing screen presence is every inch as magnetic as De Niro’s turn was. His charisma and impact on the rest of the ensemble are an aberration within a film otherwise typified by performances that could at best be described as serviceable and at worse, wanting.
Whenever a music video director transitions to feature films, there’s a learning curve. Rather than spending a ton of money over a short period of time to capture eye-catching visuals, often on non-union shoots, managing the production of a full-length movie requires more compromises, more financial considerations, and far more reliance on actual acting than on dancing and lipsyncing. Big-name filmmakers like Ridley Scott, David Fincher, and Spike Jonze got their start through the medium, but over the years, whenever newer (frequently “urban”) directors make the jump, critics tend to dismiss the output as either a prolonged music video or a series of them awkwardly stitched together.
This critique jumps out of the reviews for several debuts from music video helmers. I, myself, have levied it in the past. (On more than one occasion, I’ve referred to “Belly” as a film that “goes hard on mute.”) But it’s a disservice to a film whose value, after repeat viewings over the years, only grows.
The film’s weaknesses are numerous and easy to diagnose. The plot is little more than typical gangster movie fare: a lucrative enterprise collapses under the weight of its hubris, a toxic mixture of recklessness and karma reinforcing the maxim that crime doesn’t pay. It is also a product of its times — a key plot point is delivered to the audience via MTV News bulletin from Kurt Loder. Largely due to the majority of the cast being musicians first and actors second, most of the performances are on the rougher side, with any number of line readings being so bad as to be outright laughable. The threadbare nature of the storytelling, even at its best, still leaves a lot to be desired.
But when “Belly” is on? It is on.
The effort and resources that went into the opening sequence alone reap enough dividends to outweigh any other gripes. “Belly” opens with a black-light-lit heist in a night club meticulously arranged to the acapella of Soul II Soul’s “Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)” immediately establishing the film’s unique energy. Throughout the film, Williams and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed capture production designer Regan Jackson’s moodboard-worthy environs with the kind of vivid framing that’s still being rediscovered on Tumblr and Pinterest by young creatives who’ve likely never seen it.
Williams was one of the stewards of what hip-hop looked and felt like, a key architect in shaping what listeners saw with their headphones on and their eyes closed. The visual language of “Belly” feels like the work of someone who helped define ‘90s aesthetics while already imagining where fashion and design were headed in the 2000s. Even the parts of the film that take place far from its New York City center — the narrative’s excursions to both Jamaica and Omaha, Nebraska — are colored by the iconography of the prevalent brands of the period. At any moment, a garish man in a shiny suit might lurch forward from the periphery to mug in front of a fisheye lens.
In “Belly,” the aspirational lifestyles dramatized in rap videos are actualized by the criminals trying to reach that level of stature and opulence. When Brown visits Ox (Louie Rankin), a Jamaican drug lord, Scorsese’s legendary tracking shot at the Copa is recreated as the camera tails a live-in chef with a big-ass walkie talkie tucked in her apron through the maze of his home. Cages of pitbulls behind Brown’s silhouette feel so natural because we’re already so used to seeing DMX around them in his own videos.
For purely aesthetic reasons, “Belly” is a perfect movie to throw on for background vibes, sort of the inverse of Sincere and Brown doing the same with Harmony Korine’s deeply disturbing “Gummo” while they count up their cash. Any random image of Taral Hicks’ lubricated body as Brown’s put-upon lover Kisha feels like the sum total of Blaxploitation’s relationship with sex cranked up to 11, its 16mm fuzziness traded for images so sharp they feel like 4K before 4K.
But it’s the film’s ambitious third act that makes it truly timeless. As the systems that have sustained Sincere and Brown begin to fail them, each man takes a diverging approach to reclaiming his future. Sincere plans to move his family back to the motherland, a vision of Africa we only experience in rapturous voiceover against a backdrop of New Year’s confetti and the end of the millennium. Brown, for all his sins, becomes trapped in an undercover hit job operation against a Minister Farrakhan stand-in, torn between appeasing the feds to stay out of jail and having to betray a man who has finally shown him the light.
Through some rushed redemption, the allied forces of Williams’ imagery is employed in giving these men grace as it was in aggrandizing their transgressions.
Director X, Williams’ protege who worked on “Belly” as a visual consultant and went on to be as prolific in music videos as his mentor was, has made three feature films in the last decade. Their contemporaries like Paul Hunter and Joseph Kahn have had multiple at-bats throughout their careers, failures and box-office bombs be damned. But Williams has not worked on any other feature films. And even as the industry has shifted away from the marketing importance of the music video, Williams still dabbles with the form.
Most recently, he directed a short for his most frequent collaborator, embattled multi-hyphenate Kanye West. Filmed in black and white with the liberal usage of slow motion, the video features West’s then-nine-year-old son Saint fighting off fully grown Japanese professional wrestlers with an inflatable mallet. It lacks the style and verve of his best work, but even within this curious effort, it still stokes a craving for what a sophomore effort might have been.
What would a motion picture from one of our most important creators of images look like in 2026? While we ponder that theoretical opus, revisiting his vision of the 21st century at the tail end of the 20th will have to do.
“Belly” will be screening at The Charles on April 2 at 9 p.m. as a part of its revival series. Tickets are available here: https://thecharles.com/movie/belly/
The film is also available to stream on Prime Video as well as on Tubi (with ads.)