The trailer for Things Fall Apart: 50 Cent is as serious as cancer

By Sean O'Neal | March 9, 2011 | 8:49pm

Aux Features Film

Last year it was revealed that bullet-riddled rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson had dropped around 54 pounds in his continued bid to become a serious actor for serious people, specifically for a role in Things Fall Apart, an adaptation of the landmark Chinua Achebe novel about a college football player who gets cancer, meaning he sadly can’t become a rich NFL star. [EDIT: This is a joke. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe did not actually write a story about a college football player who is stricken with cancer. He wrote about a hockey player with AIDS.] Jackson’s method commitment to the project (which he also co-wrote!) has now paid off in what the unofficial trailer below refers to as “the most critically acclaimed role of his career”—which is quite an achievement considering the critics haven’t even been able to see it yet.

But we’re pretty sure they’re going to love it, because it has all the things that critics love in movies, like cancer, awkwardly staged football scenes, Mario Van Peebles yelling at people, and the warming presence of Ray Liotta, who plays a doctor. And once they get a look at Jackson’s performance—which goes from the tooth-baring grimaces of victory in his younger, fully dreadlocked days, to the tooth-baring grimaces of pain as he realizes he has cancer and falls down a lot, to the tooth-baring grimaces of melancholy as his family takes out its collective disappointment on him, to the tooth-baring grimaces of redemption as he survives to attend a tiny tent party in a tuxedo—they’ll surely agree, 50 Cent acted in a movie. [via Vulture]