With disturbing plausibility, Zack’s kidnapping begins to take on the guise of a coming-of-age fantasy. Suffice to say, Johnny is an amateur in the kidnapping game – by the end of the evening, Zack is happily playing Xbox with his assailants. Owed money by a dangerous tweaker named Jake (“X-Men” alum Ben Foster, in the movie’s standout performance), Johnny and his crew impulsively abduct Jake’s 15-year-old little brother, Zack (Anton Yelchin), whom they pluck off the sidewalk and stash in their van. (In one scene, an upscale housewife casually tells her daughter that she dropped Ecstasy.) The Truelove supply chain is one of elegant simplicity Johnny simply parks his car to buy some cigarettes, unlocks his trunk and returns to find it stashed with product. His drug supplier is his own father, Sonny (Bruce Willis), one of the many specimens of spectacularly bad parenting showcased by Cassavetes in his sprawling, archly humorous script. In Johnny’s case, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. To this end, he controls a small army of tattooed wannabe gangstas, including Tiko (Fernando Vargas) and Frankie (former boy-bander Justin Timberlake, surprisingly polished). Emile Hirsch plays the Hollywood character, Johnny Truelove, a 19-year-old drug dealer and pocket tyrant who makes piles of money flooding the San Fernando Valley with marijuana and meth. Using prosecutor’s notes from the real-life murder case, writer-director Nick Cassavetes has changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent. While filled with oily, fascinating intrigue, this one bears the usual genre symptoms: It’s sensationalistic, tonally uneven and a little on the hollow side. “Alpha Dog” is based on the story of real-life fugitive Jesse James Hollywood, but its true heredity can be traced to “River’s Edge,” “Better Luck Tomorrow,” “Bully” or any cautionary drama in which nihilistic, smack-talking teenagers distill their alienation and disgust into murder. And the movie doesn't dig much deeper than the boys in its representation of the persistent problem of violent, careless kids who feel lost, their childhoods "stolen.‘Alpha Dog’ should have shot straighter – Orange County Register As much as these boys want to show off their vaunted hyper-masculinity (they lift weights, fight repeatedly, pull out guns, and talk about sex a lot), they're unable to have conversations (they are, however, very adept at flinging obscenities in efforts to avoid self-examination). When one youngster points a toy gun at the camera, you get a sense of the film's dire trajectory.Īs energetic and sensational as it is, Alpha Dog gives short shrift to key themes having to do with class differences and gendered behaviors.
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