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Johnny Truelove is a middle-class kid with too much time on his hands and a burgeoning drug empire. But he makes a really big enemy when a deal with the psychotic Jake goes sour, leaving the dealer out of pocket. Johnny and his friends kidnap Jake's seventeen year-old brother Zack and hold him as collateral against the money Jake owes them. Frankie is assigned to watch Jake, but he likes the kid and shows him a good time. Then the gang realise the kidnapping carries a life sentence and things get darker.
Looking at this film, I had assumed Nick Cassavetes was a young director fresh out of film school, not a man in his fifties with a handful of other movies under his belt. He throws every available trick at the screen and hopes some of them will resolve into a recognisable style. He starts the film in sentimental fashion with a prolonged montage of home movie footage of two kids (presumably Jake and Zack) going through the usual roll-call of childhood milestones. It is overlaid with the Eva Cassidy version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". This is a strangely mawkish beginning to a film that is otherwise desperate to be "down with the kids".
The director fiddles with the timeline in terms of using interviews about incidents and characters that post-date the story. But instead of building tension as they are meant to, it makes what is going to happen to Zack feel predictable. Cassavetes adds witness numbers to frames, so you know how important certain peripheral characters are, but this feels like
an affectation in addition to the time and place stamps he employs. He uses split-screen seemingly at random and cross-cuts between Zack having the time of his life and his parents worrying about his disappearance to try to make you feel for them. The majority of the characters are unsympathetic and the director makes little attempt to humanise them, leaving the hard work to his cast. However, this doesn't always pay off as the mix of experienced and inexperienced actors shows. There are attempts to shoot the film as cinema vérité, so most of the actors adopt a naturalistic style, but as the movie progresses their actions feel more contrived. The result is an uneven hundred and seventeen minutes in the company of a film that takes itself too seriously, while worrying about whether all the viewers will think it's cool enough.
Cassavetes' screenplay is based on the real-life incidents surrounding a Californian gang headed by the bizarrely named Jesse James Hollywood, who, with his friends kidnapped a fifteen year-old boy, partied with him for the best part of a week then murdered him and dumped his body in a shallow grave. Making a film of it is hardly an original idea, as the same events were covered in the movie "Bully". We don't see enough of individual players or their relationships to care about them. The parents seem stern and out-of-touch, while their offspring are spoilt, pot-smoking, binge-drinking rich kids with too much time, money and freedom. Only one of them questions the morality of what they're doing and she is made to look like a tale-telling harridan. The pacing falters throughout as the action halts and we are taken back to another talking head interview. These are attempts to explain the players' motivations, personalities or the consequences of their actions, but mainly slow the film down. Cassavetes has a good ear for wannabe gangster-speak, peppering the dialogue with the random ethnic slurs and references to women as "bitches" that crop up all the time in the gangsta rap the characters listen to all the time. He also nails the self-indulgent chatter of the upper middle-class kids that feel hard done to.
For my money, Emile Hirsch doesn't have quite enough presence or charisma to convince as Johnny Truelove. He doesn't seem dangerous or calculating enough to be able to hold people in his thrall. Having a scrubby beard and talking like a gangster doesn't make him the hard-man the character clearly wants to be. It's all very well showing the role's cowardice, but it's too close to the surface and his cockiness doesn't cover it well enough. Ben Foster gives a tremendously intense performance as the unpredictable and psychotic Jake. He's twitchy and threatening, so you believe in his potential for violence, which is often realised. But Foster also captures the character's devotion to his little brother, which makes him less of a monster. I'll be interested to see how his career develops.
Justin Timberlake isn't half as bad as I had feared as Johnny's best mate Frankie. True, he has trouble when required to show real emotional intensity in key scenes when you can clearly tell he's acting instead of experiencing the role's feelings. But overall he's naturalistic and surprisingly likeable as the swaggering, swearing tattooed acolyte. But if you're looking for focus and commitment to a character, then look no further than Shawn Hatosy as Elvis Schmidt. He's victimised by the other characters to such an extent that he appears to have developed Stockholm Syndrome whereby he'll do anything to keep Johnny happy. Anton Yelchin is appealing as the naïve, impressionable Zack, even if he has a tendency to play the sullen middle-class teen in the company of his on-screen parents. You understand why all the trappings of Johnny's life would be alluring to him and why he wants to be one of the in-crowd. Meanwhile having Bruce Willis as Johnny's dad and Sharon Stone as Zack's mother feels like stunt casting.
The original music by Aaron Zigman struggles to be heard amongst all the other soundtrack choices and amounts to little more than a cheesy rising chorus when events are at their darkest, some lame acoustic guitar that's supposed to tug at your heartstrings and the odd flurry of electronic dance. The other tracks reflect the tastes of the characters, which run to gangster rap and hip-hop, German thrash metallers Rammstein, Eminem and ambient dub. The use of these numbers is integral to the film as they inform the worldview of the characters and their questionable vocabulary and attitudes to women.
"Alpha Dog" is another style-over-substance attempt at bringing the problems of today's youth to the screen. But it tries too hard to be contemporary and sacrifices character development for flashy film school tricks. The youthful cast doesn't have quite enough presence to fully convince in their various roles, with the exception of Ben Foster. However, it is adequate in terms of narrative and the various tics and tricks settle into an uneasy, if overly brash style. The only thing that saves it from total ignominy is the director's last-ditch attempt to inject some much needed tension into the final few minutes with a slow-burn lead-up to the inevitable. It's a shame he then goes and blows it with more talking heads that add unneeded schmaltz and subtitled epilogues that feel trite. I think it's one of those suck-it-and-see movies that will do better on DVD.
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Production Year: 1998 - Drama - Director: Carl Franklyn, Carl Franklin - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Meryl Streep, William Hurt, Renee Zellweger, Tom Everett Scott, Nicky Katt, Lauren Graham
Production Year: 2004 - Drama - Director: Nick Cassavetes - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over, 12 years and over - Starring: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Gena Rowlands
Production Year: 2007 - Drama - Director: Mike Binder - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett, Liv Tyler, Saffron Burrows, Donald Sutherland, Mike Binder
Alpha Dog is an urban drama following the self destruction of Johnny Truelove (Emile ... more
Hirsch) and his gang of friends. Living the thug wannabe's American dream of money beautiful girls and partying in Los Angeles' San Gabriel Valley - their existence i...
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Advantages: Good performances by Yelkin and Hirsch, follows story somewhat Disadvantages: Justin Timberlake, Cassavetes' handling of the material and story
eve6kicksass 15.05.2007 (15.05.2007)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of AlphaDog (Wide Screen)-DVD
Advantages: Captures the spirit of these youths very well, great performances by most of the cast Disadvantages: A few bad performances, not a film people of a certain age will enjoy
Jan 7th, 2008
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