Baby Boy

In South Central Los Angeles, twenty-year-old Jody has fathered children with two different women, Yvette and Peanut, yet he still lives in his mother Juanita's home and has no job to support anyone, including himself. He spends his days with his friend Sweetpea and avoids every demand that adulthood places on him. Juanita, who is thirty-six, wants a life of her own with her new partner Melvin, a former criminal who has turned himself around, and she pushes her son to stand on his own feet. Jody resists Melvin's presence and the pressure it brings, but his ties to Yvette and the trouble surrounding her ex-boyfriend Rodney leave him with no way to keep drifting.

John Singleton wrote, directed and produced the film, his sixth feature, arriving after Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice, Higher Learning, Rosewood and Shaft. Tyrese Gibson leads as Jody, with Taraji P. Henson as Yvette, Omar Gooding as Sweetpea, Ving Rhames as Melvin, Snoop Dogg as Rodney and A.J. Johnson as Juanita. It runs 130 minutes, cost 16 million dollars to make and took about 29 million dollars worldwide.

Opinion is mixed but respectable: on IMDb the film holds 6.5 out of 10 across roughly 18,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.1 from around 373 votes. A critics' rating of 6.7 from 93 reviews places professional response close to the audience's, slightly above the larger IMDb sample.