3 "G" is a movie based on a clever conceit. Take F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," the classic American novel about class, money, and social striving, and give it a hip-hop setting.

"Gatsby" is about a mildly disreputable bootlegger who joins the nouveau riche in order to impress Daisy, the girl who couldn't marry "a poor boy." He buys a house near hers in the Hamptons and conspires to lure her there so she can be impressed. Maybe she'll leave her lout of a husband, Tom, for him, now that he's made it.

"G" is about exactly the same thing. Summer G (Richard T. Jones) is a hip-hop impresario with the bling, the babes and the Bentleys to prove his status. He's throwing the best parties in the Hamptons.

There are other cheaters, other relationships orbiting around this triangle. And this being hip-hop, you know there are guns. It's just a question of who will be shot, by whom, once the infidelity hits the fan.

Underwood is the best thing in the film, capturing all of the physical menace and arrogance of great wealth, a shallow man who wants people to know that "I know some Negroes."

The movie was shot on the cheap in 2002, and the best you can say about it is that the Hamptons have never looked so ugly. Clothier Ralph Lauren's son Andrew has a role in it, came up with the story, and produced the film, though plainly he needed more cash for better film stock and a better cinematographer.

I suppose if you can shorten Othello down to "O," as filmmakers did in 2001, why not do the same for "The Great Gatsby"? So now we have "G" to meld the worlds of modern African-American hip-hop and the Jazz Age of F.Scott Fitzgerald. Knowledge of Fitzgerald's classic is not necessary, though a reading would make the film's shallowness all the more apparent.

For anyone to enjoy this starchy, contrived exercise in vanity and product placement, it's best not to have read the book. In fact, it's best not to have read ANY book.

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