Alpha Dog (2007) [Blu-ray]
Biography | Crime | Drama

They grew up together in the suburbs of LA, living their own version of the American dream, with every day a blur of partying and looking for the next thrill. Johnny (Emile Hirsch, Lords Of Dogtown) is the leader in their sordid world of drugs, greed, power and privilege. But when he is double-crossed by another dealer, things quickly begin to spiral out of control, and an impulsive kidnapping leads to a shocking conclusion. Justin Timberlake (Black Snake Moan), Sharon Stone (Bobby) and Bruce Willis (Lucky Number Slevin) co-star in this powerful and controversial film.

Blu-ray Review (Synopsis)
I'll give writer/director/sometime actor Nick Cassavetes this: he's unpredictable. After helming the weepy 1940's melodrama The Notebook—in which he ham-fistedly tugged at our heartstrings—he decided to take on the brutal, real life story of drug-peddling Jesse James Hollywood, the youngest criminal to ever grace the FBI's Most Wanted list, a wannabe Tony Montana who was captured in 2005 for the 1999 kidnapping and murder of a naive 15-year-old. Cassavetes' fictionalization of the tale, Alpha Dog, is as far removed from the maudlin, elderly lovers parted by death plot of The Notebook as possible, but just as the Nicholas Sparks-penned swansong is over-sweetened, Alpha Dogs is often over-dosed, too hopped up and frantic, high on its own true crime supply. Nonetheless, the film is compelling—entertaining is definitely the wrong word—as it explores a drug culture where adults act like children and teenagers try desperately to seem adult.

The crime film begins almost incongruously, with a montage of childhood super-8 movies and VHS videos set to a plaintive rendition of "Over the Rainbow." These are happy, well-adjusted kids, playing in the backyard, having a good time. Obviously, this isn't going to last. If nothing else, Alpha Dog is about innocence ended too soon. To prove that point we're introduced to Jesse James Hollywood, renamed Johnny Truelove here and played by versatile actor Emile Hirsch. Johnny, at the ripe old age of 20, is one of So-Cal's premiere dope dealers, raised into the profession by his father Sonny (Bruce Willis), who serves as his supplier. You might say Johnny is a chunk, not a chip, off the old block.

Johnny's so loaded that he already owns a large house, and he's got an entourage of likeminded youth-gone-bad, including Elvis (Shawn Hatosy), a servile sycophant who owes Johnny his life, and Frankie (Justin Timberlake), a laid-back right-hand man. Currently, though, there's trouble in druggie paradise. Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster), a crank-addict and neo-Nazi skinhead from a well-to- do Jewish family—how's that for a walking contradiction—owes Johnny twelve hundred bucks. There's a scuffle, brandished guns, death threats. These kids have been watching too many rap videos. Jake even takes a steaming dump in Johnny's living room in retaliation.

So, what does Johnny do? In broad daylight—in front of witnesses, no less—he kidnaps Jake's younger brother Zack (Anton Yelchin), a sweet-faced 15-year-old who's experimenting with pot, getting into trouble with his parents, and basically ambling along in his elder bro's footsteps. Charged with prison guard duty, Frankie keeps the kid hostage at his father's palatial estate— complete with a garden where pot is grown alongside organic vegetables—and for a while, being kidnapped is a win-win situation for Zack, who gets to smoke a lot of weed, play video games, and flirt with a procession of sexy young party girls, including Big Love's Amanda Seyfried, who comes to call him "Stolen Boy." As it slowly dawns on Johnny, however, that he could be in a metric shit-ton of trouble with the law if word of the kidnapping leaks, Zack's fate teeters precariously.

Informed viewers will already know what happens, but that doesn't stop the director from ratcheting up the tension and toying with our expectations. Admittedly, the whole set up, even though it's based on a true story, feels emotionally trumped up, even manipulative. After seeing Zack bond with his captors and essentially come of age throughout the course of the film, it's impossible to not be moved as he pleads for his life. The tone throughout is a bit uneven, tilted too often toward absurdly comic moments, like when Jake takes out a roomful of partiers with vicious Tae-kwon-do moves. (So, make that black belt, speed-addled, Jewish neo-Nazi skinhead.) Foster does give the film's most intense performance—his face ticks, his eyes dart, and he erupts into sudden, esophagus-searing screams—but at times it goes a little too far. Emile Hirsch is more balanced, and he manages to undercut his character's bravado with palpable cowardice. The best acting, though, comes from Justin Timberlake, whose dramatic chops prove equal to his comedic, dick-in-a-box-on-SNL skills. The relationship that develops between Timberlake and Anton Yelchin is deftly played and one of the most fulfilling aspects of the film.

Cassavetes frames Alpha Dog as a docu-drama, placing text onscreen to indicate times, locations, and the names of witnesses, and he also occasionally stages fake interviews with the actors playing the family members of those involved. In the film's worst scene, part of an unnecessary epilogue, Sharon Stone—who plays Zack's mom—is forced to emote while wearing an extremely fake-looking fat suit. There are far better ways to show that a woman has been affected by trauma. Bruce Willis fares better as Sonny, and early on, in one of the mock interviews, he gets to sum up the film's theme: "This whole thing is about parenting, about taking care of your children." And it certainly is. The film's biggest accomplishment is the way it dissects the lives of rich parents who act like teenagers while expecting their privileged children to act like adults. The absentee moms and dads may not be completely to blame for the actions of their children, but they're certainly complicit. Johnny and his gangsta-wannabe cohorts are allowed to live in a perpetual fantasy world, and when reality inevitably intrudes, they lack the mental wherewithal to make good decisions. It's all fun and games until someone gets shot.

User Comment: *** This review may contain spoilers *** farrellrose from Hollywood, 5 February 2006 • I got a chance to see a screening of this at Sundance. This movie sucks you in, seduces you, entrances you, then whacks you over the head with a baseball bat.

It starts off fairly annoying... bunch of pimply-faced white wanna-be's spouting rapid fire ghetto speak with rap music blaring in the background. Eminem would be proud. I thought to myself, "oh no, here we go to one dimensional city...".

But after a while these characters became very likable. These are REAL characters, living a really dangerous life style. The effect is similar in Goodfellas... they're so bad, so annoying, but fascinating, and free in ways ordinary people aren't. They do what they want, when they want and give you a bloody nose if you try and stop them.

There's a mood, an energy, a style that Cassavettes was able to capture and portray that made this film so far removed from any clichéd studio product geared toward teenyboppers. The film feels honest and genuine, and that's the difference.

At a certain point, after all the partying, and boozing and drugging, the film takes a turn for the worse and climaxes into a gut wrenching, horrible tragedy that left me (and the audience) stunned.

Overall it's an extremely well crafted film, definitely worth seeing.

And I almost forgot to mention the biggest surprise of all... Justin Timberlake. Forget what you know, forget N'SYNC, this guy is a real actor. I almost feel strange saying this, but it's true... He was stunning, almost stole the movie; crackled whenever he was on screen. He has all the right ingredients for a stellar acting career; charisma, screen presence, that separates him from the pretty faced phonies clogging the movie screens. Every moment he was on screen he was doing something that worked, and he makes it look easy, the most important trait a great actor has. I'll definitely be watching his acting career very closely from now on.

Summary: Surprisingly good.
Summary: Good..disturbing.

[CSW] -1.4- None of the acting seemed believable to me. They portrayed people that didn't react behave, or speak as I would expect real people to do. Stoned or sober the portrayal was so bad that I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. I don't know if it was the writing, directing or just a poor understanding of any of the characters' motivation but the movie seemed to be simply trying to portray what happened with no understanding of why it was happening. Just bad acting doesn't explain the lack of any understanding of the motivation of the main characters. I say skip this one altogether.
[V4.0-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - D-Box 1.5/10 - Only a very few scenes had motion and even those were sub-par which seemed to match the overall poor performance of the movie as a whole.

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