The late Big Pun was a talented rapper, a Latino icon, and a beloved figure in the world of hip-hop. He was also one of the worst actors in the world, a hilariously stiff would-be thespian whose work in Urban Menace and Thicker Than Water set the art of cue-card reading back at least two decades. Pun died earlier this year, but it looks like there's a finally a rapper ready to assume his position as hip-hop's worst actor: Pras, who lends his unique brand of mush-mouthed anti-charisma to Turn It Up, a murky, awful urban drama. Combining the two most popular rapsploitation plots—the generic gangsta story and the one in which the rapper tries to leave the streets behind through music—Turn It Up casts Pras as a street hustler with a pregnant girlfriend, a coke-addled producer, a hotheaded partner (Ja Rule), and no discernible personality. He sees making a demo as his way out of the street game, but he must first contend with his nefarious drug-dealing boss and a sinister record executive who looks like a cross between a Ken doll and Christian Bale in American Psycho. Pras must also come to terms with Rule, a trigger-happy loose cannon for whom he feels responsible but who doesn't share his humanitarian reservations about murdering pregnant women. Writer-director Robert Adetuyi has two sets of clichés with which to work, crime clichés and show-biz clichés, and he joylessly exploits both while finding room for time-filling live performances from Pras, Ja Rule, and special guest Faith Evans. With The Fugees, Pras was always the weak link, but here he's the whole show, his barely decipherable monotone and dazed presence sapping the life out of what was already a terrible film. Far from establishing him as an actor or performer of any worth, Turn It Up merely solidifies Pras' standing as the Ringo Starr of hip-hop, a hapless footnote lucky enough to have stumbled upon collaborators exponentially more talented than himself.