A friend of everybody is a friend of nobody. Pick a side.

Innocent Shots is the first 2024 film for How About Notflix, so you know it was bound to be a Hood Tubi movie. Directed by King JBoi and written by Jeremy D’Juan Carr, Innocent Shots is a film about two hustlers whose lives are torn apart when one decides to go legit and the other one wants to keep living that crime life.

Specifically Bobby (De’Andrae Freeman) and his glorious beard, and his cohort Lake (Jermaine Jefferson) and his big rose neck tattoo. Bobby’s girl Ava (Benicka Janae’ Grant) is a photography model trying to pull him out of his life of crime and show that he can prove himself as a better person. Hell, he could even become a photographer and take photographs of her and get paid for it. Listen to your girl Bobby, if someone as good looking as Benicka Grant tells you to turn your life around because she’s concerned for you, you do what she says. She knows what’s best. Count your blessings before they hatch.

But to get out of his life of crime, Bobby is going to have to deal with some people who don’t want him leaving. Namely his cousin Lake who just wants to keep making paper. Lake has a great idea that can’t possibly go wrong; rob Marcus (Vairrun Strickland). I don’t think they ever actually do this. We transition to a scene where Marcus almost looks right at the camera to point out that Bobby not fucking with him is one of his top three favorite personality traits about Bobby, and how bad things would be if he lost that. This gives Shame bad ideas.

My favorite person in this film is Shame, who basically becomes the main character halfway through the movie. Shame’s job is to go around sewing discord and distrust between the main cast in order to play both sides and ensure he comes out on top no matter who wins. It just goes to show you can’t trust a dude with a scraggly beard and a rat stache. The film also tends to show him specifically in really close, cropped out shots when he’s trying to pull a fast one, and I wanna think that’s the director showing how Shame stops people from seeing the full picture.

Maybe it’s because DeAndre Grafton really wants people to be entranced by his freckles.

Innocent Shots is a cut above the other films we review here for Hood Tubi. I’m used to these movies being shot on cell phone with audio that sounds like it was ADR’d in an empty warehouse. The audio tends to be little more than whatever’s in the scene when they shoot it and rap music to transition scenes. Here there’s mood music to set the atmosphere, silence when the scene calls for it, sound effects ADR’d in for simple things easy to overlook like cooking breakfast, and of course rap music for scene transitions. They also have great lighting in night scenes.

And there are a lot of rap transitions. There’s a few times in this movie where we get a couple minutes of scene transition, only for the next scene to be less than a minute, and then another 30 seconds of scene transition. Innocent Shots has everything I want out of these films. Guns, blunts, stacks of cash, dudes flashing guns and stacks of cash, and gorgeous women. King JBoi isn’t in the film much, but he does make a hell of an appearance. The action doesn’t really kick off until the last 15 minutes or so, and up to that point it’s mostly character development.

The worst thing I can say for the film is that it does have bad audio at times, often peaking and muffling whenever characters start yelling. Gotta turn that audio down, chief. Otherwise I really enjoyed the full hour and a half of Innocent Shots. The movie sets up for a sequel at the end, and I’ll be here waiting for it.

Rating: B+