Waist Deep (DVD)

Waist Deep

Ex-con Otis (Tyrese Gibson), or "O2" as he was once known on account of his ability to vanish from a crime scene like oxygen, has done his time and is now determined to stay out of trouble and never leave his young son, Otis, Jr. (played by Vondie Curtis-Hall's young son, Henry Hunter Hall), ever again.

When O2 shows up late to pick Junior up from school one afternoon, he swears that he will always come back for Junior. That promise is put to the test just moments later when O2's vintage 1960's Chevrolet Impala SS Lowrider convertible is stolen from him at gunpoint in the middle of a crowded Southland intersection with Junior in the back seat.

O2 chases the car and gets into a nasty gun battle with the carjackers circumstances that then make it impossible for O2 go to the police but to no avail.

O2 does, however, catch up with Coco (Meagan Good), a woman who sells stolen suits on the streets for a thug known as P Money (Julius Denem). O2 knows she is the one who marked him for the carjacking, and he forces her to help him retrieve Junior. Lucky (Larenz Tate), Otis' unreliable cousin who works for Big Meat (Jayceon "Game" Taylor), the brutally vicious leader of the Outlaw Syndicate, also offers to help.

After a few hours on the street, Lucky comes back with some bad news: Junior has fallen into Meat's hands, and Meat (the main antagonist of the film) is demanding that O2 deliver $100,000 by midnight the following night, or Junior will die. Otis claims that he has no money, but Meat thinks otherwise: Meat was once O2's partner in crime, and he thinks O2 is still holding onto the $100,000 they made off their last job together the job that got O2 six years in prison.

Desperate to raise the cash, O2 comes up with a plan: he and Coco will rob P Money's and Meat's own operations, staging it to look like the one is stealing from the other, and thereby triggering a gang war that will hopefully eliminate both and help O2 and Coco rescue Junior. After a successful robbery of one of the Big Meat's locations, O2 and Coco come across a set of safe deposit box keys belonging to numerous banks in the area. The next day with time wearing thin, they stage a number of bank robberies and are able to retrieve expensive jewellery, which Lucky offers to get rid of eager to prove his worth. When Lucky takes the jewelry to Big Meat unknowing that it belongs to Big Meat, Lucky is forced to set up a meeting between himself, O2, and Coco, with Big Meat along to end O2 once and for all.

They take a car to an alley and give him the money. It is then revealed that Big Meat never intended to let Junior live, as he signals one of his men to kill Junior. Lucky sees this and tackles him as the man shoots many shots, one shooting Lucky in the side of the chest. O2 kills Meat's men, leaving only Meat. He then proceeds to shoot O2 but has no shots remaining. O2 shoots and kills him and retrieves Junior.

On the road, they stop at a gas station to attend to Lucky's wound. O2 tells Lucky that they will get him to a hospital, but he realizes that Lucky has died. Swerving off the road, they are chased by the cops. O2 hides in a parking lot and tells Coco that she must take Junior and go to the Mexican border while he outruns the cops. As Junior and Coco escape, O2 is tailed by the cops. They run him to a dead end where the lake is. O2, realizing he has no choice, drives straight into the water.

In Mexico, Coco and Junior are living in a house on a beach. They are walking on the beach when Junior sees something in the distance. He and Coco find that it is O2, who has escaped the ocean and come back to them, as he promised. They then reunite.