Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Forever Rich’ on Netflix, Where A Rapper Finds His Ego Upended When His Life Goes Viral

Directed and co-written by filmmaker Shady El-Hamus, Forever Rich (Netflix) introduces us to Dutch rapper Richie, whose carefully composed life and image are ripped apart overnight. Richie can talk the talk. But he gets in all kinds of trouble when he tries to talk the talk. 

FOREVER RICH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Richie (Jonas Smulders) is the shit in Dutch hip-hop, and he has the fur coats, platinum grill, and creeping neck tattoo to prove it. Or at least that’s how he sees it, from his insulated perch backstage at the arena that will host his first big tour. Surrounded by an entourage that includes a camera crew (the better to film those instant TikToks), his hanger-on/best friend Tonie (Daniel Kolf), his belligerent, alcoholic mother Els (Hadewych Minis), and his harried manager Jessica (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing), who’s just secured him a three-album record deal with Sony, Richie fires brash missives into the social media void and rambles to anyone in earshot about how he came from nothing, but knew “deep down that I was worth a million. Get it?”

Richie’s manufactured persona drips with bravado, but it’s a thin veneer. The toadies and yesmen won’t say anything, but his eyes seek approval whenever his mother speaks up, and he’s a little boy again, hamming for her camera and spazzing out about building a McDonald’s in his mansion. And that veneer proves to be even thinner when he and Tonie are jumped by masked thugs on scooters. They beat him down, steal his prized wristwatch, and film the entire attack for social media. “Wanna be gangster, acting tough in your videos. Look at those tears.”

A cut over his eye is one thing. But the shot to his self-esteem is the deeper wound. The Internet comes alive with headlines. “Rapper Richie Humiliated online!” “Robbed Rapper Cries on Camera!” and the likes and comments are nails in Riche’s suddenly canceled coffin. Determined to get his watch back and right the social media narrative, Richie and Tonie embark on a haphazard quest to engage their attackers, and the battle rages back and forth across the viral landscape as the would-be best-ever rapper learns a lesson or two about humility, the fickle nature of social media fame, and his own damn self.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Hater, a 2020 film from Poland also available on Netflix, similarly probed the indeterminate, often dangerous intersection of Very Online and IRL. And Forever Rich shares its probing visual sense with Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time, another film which unspools its increasing tension over the course of one eventual night.

Performance Worth Watching: As Richie’s girlfriend and baby momma Anna, Sinem Kavus brings real gravity to a woman forced to live in the shadow of a man’s narcissism. Bound to Richie through their baby son, Anna is left to also babysit his drunk mom while the petulant rapper preens and pouts in the public forum of the Internet. It’s cutting when she’s finally had enough. “Look at yourself,” she sneers at Richie in a later scene. “You’ll never be a father. You’re not even a man. You’re just a child. So fucking insecure.”

Memorable Dialogue: Tonie is one of the only people in Richie’s inner circle who will actually speak the truth to the rapper, and when the thieves start posting his private material to the Internet, he’s incredulous that Richie would have this very damning, embarrassing stuff hanging out on a phone in the first place. “If I knew you had a whole folder of dick pics on that phone, I would’ve protected it better. This is a stupid celebrity mistake, bro. Why do you have such a fucking stupid code?”

Sex and Skin: When Richie’s sex tape with Anna goes viral, it’s a new level of social media nightmare for all involved.

Our Take: The vibe of Forever Rich feels formed from the very TikTok posts and FaceTime conversations that pepper the film, moving at the speed of frantic fingers typing out instant reactions to content and often feeling as gaseous and paper thin as Richie’s fragile ego. People only say “Yes” to the rapper, because he’s buying them sushi dinners and giving out iPhones as party favors. And so when the world pushes back, and it’s time to get serious, nobody in this world can do it, and the ones who try — Anna, Tonie — are pushed away by Richie. But as his universe dissipates quickly in the harsh blue glare of a device’s screen, Richie collapses in a blubbering heap, half-realizing that he’s lost Anna the only person who really mattered, and partly coming around to the fact that probably nobody ever believed he was a tough, street-tested rapper in the first place — the fans, the hangers-on, the voices without faces online. If you often find yourself contending with social media fatigue, as so many of us do, then Forever Rich will only reinforce the notion that the way we communicate today is poison. What it also represents outright is that Richie’s bragging and carrying on is just a function of that environment.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t read the comments, they say. Well, Dutch rapper Richie does, and his Forever Rich fairy tale becomes a forever warped problem that he might not recover from.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges