Ja Rule
Ja Rule is an actor, born 1976.
The music came first and it was enormous. Signed to Irv Gotti's Murder Inc, Ja Rule released Venni Vetti Vecci in 1999 and then spent several years running one of the most commercially exact formulas in pop: a rasping gangsta-rap verse, a sung R&B hook, a guest vocalist. Holla Holla, Put It on Me, Always on Time and his features on Jennifer Lopez's I'm Real and Ain't It Funny made him inescapable on radio around 2001.
The acting arrived alongside the records and was cast accordingly. He is Edwin in The Fast and the Furious, a supporting role in what turned out to be the small first film of an enormous franchise; Nick Frazier in Half Past Dead; Smiley in the Assault on Precinct 13 remake; Razor in Wrong Side of Town; the lead, Miles Montego, in I'm in Love with a Church Girl. Nobody was asking him to disappear into a character. He was cast for the voice and the association, and within those limits he is watchable, particularly when a film lets him be funny rather than hard.
His most-watched screen appearances now are probably not the films at all. As a co-founder of the Fyre Festival he appears in both documentaries made about it, in each case through archive footage rather than a sit-down interview, which is its own kind of commentary on how that story was told.
Movies (14)
- Scary Movie 3 (2003)
- Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
- Shall We Dance? (2004)
- Half Past Dead (2002)
- I'm in Love with a Church Girl (2013)
- The Fast and the Furious (2001)
- Fyre (2019)
- The Cookout (2004)
- Turn It Up (2000)
- Fyre Fraud (2019)
- Wrong Side of Town (2010)
- Reboot Camp (2020)
- Pauly Shore Is Dead (2003)
- Beef (2003)
TV (4)
Where to start with Ja Rule
Arrive where everyone else did: The Fast and the Furious. Edwin is a supporting part in the first and smallest entry in the series, and there is real pleasure in seeing that world before it discovered submarines.
The interesting double bill is Fyre and Fyre Fraud, two competing documentaries about the same disaster, both released in 2019, both worth watching in either order for how differently they handle the same footage.
For the acting, Half Past Dead is the nearest thing to a leading action role and is exactly as good as that sounds, Assault on Precinct 13 is a decent remake that he is genuinely fine in, and Turn It Up is the early one where the casting is essentially himself. Hot Ones is where he comes across best, because there is nothing to play.