Best Actor 2005: Terrence Howard in Hustle and Flow

Terrence Howard received his first Oscar nomination for portraying Djay a pimp who wants to become a rapper in Hustle and Flow.

Hustle and Flow is a film that I never became very interested in and most of the time it bored me, although this may partially come from my distaste for rap.

Terrence Howard's performance here is one of those performances that never is really obviously bad, except for the fact that his accent seems to be completely arbitrary. He never is doing a bad job in a big over the top way but his performance here fails anyways. The problem I found throughout this performance was he never really made his character come alive very much. For some reason to me it seemed like he was just going through the motions, and never created a very interesting or energetic screen presence.  He never achieves the normal point of a performance which is to be a compelling character.

He never becomes interesting in the least. I followed Djay as he went into rapping but I never became interested by his journey because Howard never made his character come alive. I did not know what to really make of his character because Howard never really suggested who are what his character was. He made no suggestions to what Djay might think or who he truly is. He just is a boring character, Howard never really showed what Djay was thinking about what he was doing or his life. He has some scenes where he yells at people that show more emotions that his standard emotions. His yelling scenes are just yelling he again adds nothing about Djay. I knew barely anything about Djay about watching this film, since Howard really did basically nothing with this character. He was a pimp who wanted to be a rapper, yeah but what else was my question the whole time I was watching this.