A JAMAICAN'S opinion of this movie
I'm not sure why no one has posted this yet, but there were two things which struck me as blatantly obvious and I was not able to ignore them, so they ended up helping to ruin the movie for me. Both of them involved stereotypes of Jamaicans which I keep seeing in movies; and they annoy the hell out of me and a couple other Jamaicans.
The first one is the fake accents, which are driving me CRAZY. Now this takes a small amount of time to get to you since the first couple of times it comes off as amusing, and then afterward, when you begin to notice that Jamaicans who are portrayed in every movie acts like this, it borders on INSULTING. For example, after being on the earth for nearly 20 years I'm yet to hear an actual Jamaican saying "mon" after every sentence, unless they're mocking Hollywood's interpretation of Jamaican patois. Why does Hollywood never use Jamaican actors since American actors obviously can't imitate Jamaican patois well??? Hell, forget about the patois! They can't even get the accent itself right. So, this ends up where whenever I travel to the United States people keep asking me why I don't talk like they do in movies, and then telling me that I'm not Jamaican...
The second most annoying thing is how the Jamaican way of life, people and culture are portrayed on screen and thus, in this movie. We're portrayed as dirt poor and dirty Rastafarians even though our country is majority Christian, and we keep ourselves clean. We always live on the beach in shacks, even though most people don't live near the coast. I've even had people in the United States ask me if I live in a tree...Too many people, and not one of them were joking... Our women are always overweight and on their way to the market in long skirts...We have no sources of technology and everything is backward even though a large percentage of the population own cell phones for example...
Oh these are only a few, but what I'm really trying to say is that I hated this movie because of the stereotypes reinforced. Admit it. You'd feel like this too if your country kept being portrayed like this, and it seems a number of people from certain countries believe nothing else but what they see on television.