After all the hype and anticipation, Chance the Rapper's big Joliet movie finally hit theaters.
The eagerly awaited world premiere of “Slice” was held Monday night in Chicago and 20 other cities. Unfortunately, none of those cities was Joliet. Which is an insult when you think about how they made the movie down here.
The whole thing is in Joliet. There's Union Station, some Des Plaines River bridges, a body floating in the Van Buren Plaza fountain, Bicentennial Park and even office of The Herald-News.
Yes, the filmmakers got to shoot a scene at The Herald-News. For free. And do you think they could be bothered sending down an invitation to attend the premiere in Chicago or one of the 20 other cities that were not Joliet? They could not.
Showing it at the Rialto would have been a nice gesture, one that was not made by the creators of “Slice” and is unlikely to ever happen now.
That's because the film was shown for one night only and then pulled from theaters all together, likely due to “Slice” being not such a great movie.
In “Slice,” Joliet, which they renamed “Kingfisher” for the movie, is “home to one of the world's largest ghost populations,” which “isn't easy.”
The mayor of Kingfisher had expelled all the ghosts from the city, moving them “into their own neighborhood just west of town.” Which would be what? Shorewood? In “Slice,” they call Shorewood the “Ghost Town Neighborhood.”
They don't touch on it in the movie, but the mayor and city council would have been smart to set up the Ghost Town Neighborhood in the abandoned Old Kingfisher Prison on Collins Street so they could turn the place into a haunted house. That way, by the time Halloween rolled around, they could charge upwards of $50 for admission, maybe even open up a restaurant and hotel. There's no way they could screw something like that up.
At any rate, early on in the movie a pizza deliveryman gets his throat slashed on the front step of a ghost's house and, for some reason, there is suspicion that a ghost may have committed the murder. It may have even been a “ghost conspiracy.”
So now we have a mystery to unravel, and it takes most of the movie to get to the bottom of it. Which is kind hard to buy into, even in a movie with ghosts.
This shouldn't be so difficult. You have to think the slain pizza man would come back as a ghost himself, since ghosts are a thing in this movie. And then he could just tell everybody who killed him.
But wait — he does come back as a ghost. A drug-abusing ghost who proves less than helpful in solving his own murder. In fact, he doesn't help at all.
It might be the ghost's drug abuse that prevents him from telling anyone who cut his throat at the beginning of the movie. Or it might be some other reason. Who can say? The ghost certainly can't. Either that or he has chosen not to.
Chance the Rapper's character shows up on a scooter about a half hour into the movie. He plays a werewolf, one that had been off because he was suspected of murdering Chinese food deliverymen.
But now Chance the Werewolf is back, just as pizza delivery people are getting murdered left and right in the Kingfisher area.
Coincidence? Stop reading if you'd rather pay $4.99 to find out. If you want to know without paying, keep reading.
It turns out that it actually was just a coincidence. The Werewolf was not the murderer. The Kingfisher police, and others, just thought the worst of him. Probably because he was a werewolf.
He may not have committed murder, but Chance the Werewolf does kidnap a reporter from The Herald-News — which in “Slice” is called the Kingfisher Chronicle — in hopes she will write a story about how he is not the murderer.
Much like murder, kidnapping is a serious crime. But the reporter doesn't tell on Chance the Werewolf to the police so he doesn't get in any trouble.
And that's pretty much it. Consider your time and money saved.
Maybe the movie would have seemed more impressive on the big screen of a grand theater like the Rialto than it did streaming on a laptop. Even if it didn't, it would still have been a huge night for Joliet if they made it one of the cities included in the premiere.
After all, Joliet was good enough for them to shoot the movie here. Too bad they didn't think it was good enough to show it here too.
• Joe Hosey is the editor of The Herald-News. You can reach him at 815-280-4094, at jhosey@shawmedia.com or on Twitter @JoeHosey.