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Crime movie gritty, zany, good |
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Written by Colin Covert, MCT
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Monday, 15 January 2007 |
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‘Alpha Dog’
2 out of 4
Emile Hirsch, Justin Timberlake, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Willis
R /1 hr. 58 mins. / Cinemark 16, Carmike 10, Carmike 5, Metrolux 14
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It takes a few minutes to figure out we’re in crime thriller territory.
The front line characters in the weird, edgy, chaotically energetic “Alpha Dog” are all tattooed suburban posers in their twenties. Their lifestyle — rad Southern California bachelor pads, fine ladies, testosterone overload and bushels of weed — feels like a nonstop house party starring the cast of “Jackass.”
The story, a fictionalized account of a real-life FBI case, arrives in bits and chunks, with pseudo-documentary “interviews,” typographical factoids appearing like subtitles, flash-forwards and new-waveish split screens. Arrogant, babyfaced Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) is a major dope dealer to the upper class whose posse of dim-bulb henchmen and suckups accept his abuse as the price they pay for a sweet standard of living. There’s no way they could achieve it on their own.
Johnny’s no valedictorian himself. Whatever he understands about running a gang seems to have come in part from his dodgy dad Sonny (Bruce Willis) and thug-posturing gangsta rap videos. So when his skinhead associate Jake (Ben Foster) comes up short repaying a $1,200 debt, Johnny goes Scarface and launches a quick-escalating conflict. Jake breaks into Johnny’s house, smashes everything and leaves a personal calling card that will require a lot of carpet shampoo to remove. Johnny takes Jake’s teenage brother Zack (Anton Yelchin) until he gets his payoff.
Johnny’s charming, laid-back best boy Frankie (Justin Timberlake) and resentful lackey Elvis (Shawn Hatosy) grab kid brother and haul him off to Palm Springs, where the abduction looks as though it will be nothing more serious than a weekend of pool parties with spoiled, fun-loving local girls getting aroused by the drama of playing with the cute young “kidnap boy.”
Director-writer Nick Cassavetes breaks the boundaries of genre crime movies, showing us the events through a cracked kaliedoscope. There are over three dozen witnesses to the crime — each time one appears, their number is displayed on the screen — but they are too apathetic to interfere. Rather than turn the camera away when disaster strikes, he keeps his suffering characters in close, uninterrupted focus, pushing us squarely into their pain. He follows a lurid killing with an ugly sex scene, turning the discomfort up to eleven.
The film is intricate, audacious and zany, with some scenes that play like pitch-black comedy even though they seem to be dead serious.
Oddly enough, that scattershot aesthetic suits the grimly violent tale of a crime where nothing was planned and random events nudged the participants toward tragedy. | Only registered users can write comments.
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