More notable for its director's biographical profile than for its crude and incoherent assemblage of 'hood-movie clichés, Boricua's Bond is the first work from writer, director, and star Val Lik, a 20-year-old Russian émigré who grew up in a Puerto Rican enclave in Brooklyn. Lik's background evokes comparison to Matty Rich, another New Yorker who made his breakthrough, 1991's Straight Out Of Brooklyn, at 19. But while both films are well-intentioned, autobiographical melodramas about getting out of the neighborhood, they also suggest the work of precocious talents who may have busted out too soon, before their respective gifts have really developed. Rich has only made one other film since, the forgettable coming-of-age piece The Inkwell; if anything, Lik's prospects seem even more dire. Though front-lined by such hip-hop stars as Big Pun, Method Man, Redman, Treach, and Stickyfingaz, Boricua's Bond is a Master P-style promotional bait-and-switch, using five minutes of big-name cameos to sell an unknown cast. The late Pun bookends the film with forceful, if largely indecipherable, bits of advice about being an artist ("Fuck school! Just do it!," or words to that effect), setting up the main thread in a slice-of-life that echoes Do The Right Thing. Elements of Lik's background seep into the two young heroes, one a Puerto Rican painter (Frankie Negron) with ambitions to get an art scholarship and escape the ghetto, the other a scrawny white misfit (Lik) forced to move into the neighborhood after his father dies. The two become fast friends and Lik is soon absorbed into Negron's band of ne'er-do-wells, which protects him from daily beatings while bringing on a whole new set of dangers. Boricua's Bond bursts with at least a half-dozen more subplots than Lik knows what to do with—an outtake reel in the closing credits suggests that much was left on the cutting-room floor—and what remains is a jumble of gratuitous violence and listless improvisational sessions. To follow Pun's advice, Lik obviously had the drive to get a feature film made, but that hasn't yet made him an artist.